211–220 of 370 posts
Many people start their dev career with OSS and that was remote before it was cool.
They have a asynchronous remote first culture from the ground up.
This can't be said for the average company. Those have mostly no processes and getting up to speed at the water cooler mentality. No shit that people with little experience fail there.
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100% disagree. I will NOT be productive at a desk if you put me in front of a single monitor, period. That has been the case since I first tried a dual screen in a professional setting and realised the benefits. A related note is that I loathe garbage keyboards. If you make me type on some garbage rubber-dome with unbalanced and scratchy keys, I will not be happy.
I have been using a single 28" 4K screen for a while and I've never felt like I needed more pixels since. At 100% scaling there's a ton of space. No need to go through the minimize, maximize, switch, switch back usage pattern. I've never understood why people are willing to put up with garbage gear either. I'm not talking about the computer itself, but the things you touch. You sit at this machine and use it for 8h+…
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Utterly nonsense. How about children learning from home via a laptop? Doesn't work. Same for people who need to be trained in a new work environment. You want real interaction. You need to experience more than only sound and video in order to learn efficient. It's extremely wrong to think that good performers can always do these things from home. Not right.
I just want to note that my experience is the exact opposite of this in every regard.
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I think anyone who can’t work well remote, on average, will not be your top performers anyway. What I mean by that — as a manager and one of the senior engineers, I had insight across our organization to projects and employee performance. Those who thrived being remote were those who already were the top performers. Those who were followers; who lacked discipline, failed faster and more obviously. Most software engin…
Pair programming is a fantastic tool. Why the snark?
I've come across people that are very good at getting "help" on their work to the point that they do very little work.
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> no source code on your laptop Cybersecurity policies and work from home has always been extraordinarily strange to me. Optical character recognition exists. Big Corp, trust me, if I wanted to steal your stuff, I'd have it already. Stop locking my laptop down, we both know that's mostly a scare tactic.
I think the main concern is theft of the laptop. They do trust you. They don't want someone to have your drive with proprietary source, even if the drive is encrypted.
Since this is Google, I think this just means that they don’t trust employees. And that’s a bad situation.
If you can’t trust employees to not do bad things with the tools required for their jobs, then it’s going to result in unhappy and unproductive people.
It’s like not giving carpenters nail guns because someone killed someone.
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I agree, and have to wonder what would happen if pre-remote some researcher tried to break it down to 'Computer Science Graduate' and 'Taught themselves on CodeAcademy' I would bet the CS graduate is having a much easier time self-learning at home than the no-degree person who usually stops peoples work 12-15 times a day to get them to explain concepts or show them around the code, again...
Huh, I'd expect the self taught person to be more capable of teaching themselves the codebase than the CS grad, especially once you get into companies doing bog standard CRUD API + SPA webapp for a SaaS. It's the new grads from courses that are theory heavy and practice light that expect a lecturer or tutor to guide them through the whole process in my experience.
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no it isn't.
It is a claim without proof which discredits people failing in a remote job. Comes pretty close to an insult TBH. Considering that success and failure in remote jobs does depend a lot on the team, the organization, the planning etc.. not only the person itself. Also e.g. this sentence by GP raised red flags for me: > Most software engineers produce more effort than they’re worth and skate by with meetings, “pair prog…
It was an opinion. Given based on someone's anecdotal experience.
I'll stand by my original statement regarding whether that is a personal attack:
> No it isn't.
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> lol.. what a blanket statement.
agreed on that point. I believe that statement definitely missed the mark, imo.
This is not a surprise to me. I think it also applies to some people who are senior and new on a project or team. Or people with a more synchronous working style. I think remote has been toxic to productivity in all sorts of companies and for all sorts of people. I think there's in general a "personality type" that does really well with remote in a certain kind of job and thrives with fairly asynchronous disconnected…
> I think there's in general a "personality type" that does really well with remote in a certain kind of job and thrives with fairly asynchronous disconnected tasks, and on HN I think there's a bias towards seeing our whole industry that way. Sites like HN are popular with people who prefer to socialize online and have chosen online communities to be a part of. Remote work is a natural extension of how they’ve built…
Personally, I can attest that in person has some advantages over remote ( training comes to mind ), but I agree with the gist of the article that a lot depends on the audience ( some people don't need constant hand-holding ). And that is just two facets without touching the fact that not all jobs can be remote ( although a lot could be ) and some industries are ran by, well, old people who only know of one way to do things.
Is it harder? It can be. My team was fine, but some of us were already fighting for off-site schedule pre-pandemic.
After pandemic started, I made an obvious prediction that we will see some differentiation in companies ( full remote, hybrid, in person ). Workforce already voted for what they want ( remote jobs see 3-4 times the applicants ), but it is a larger cultural shift and companies would love to keep remote as a carrot for 'top performers'.
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The funny thing is that I got my "start" in programming doing things remote. Open source development, and in the 90s, IRC, MUDs/MOOs, etc. I have all sorts of collaborators and friends I've actually never met in person. And we were pretty productive. But that's not how $work went, when it went remote. All the open sores just festered and got worse. I know for a fact multiple projects delayed or faltered because of th…
I mostly agree with you, but we should remember that the shift to remote happened abruptly due to an unprecedented, immensely disruptive pandemic. This was not a controlled experiment where we can automatically attribute any issues that emerged after the shift to inherent flaws in remote work. That said, I think your experiences with the limitations of remote are valid and shouldn't be dismissed, although I personall…
Probably, actually, I'll end up renting a desk out of home somewhere nearby.
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IMO, an expensive keyboard/mouse/monitor isn't necessary for a junior to succeed. Plenty of coders learned on much worse.
I actually find it hard to switch from my "bad" hardware, I'm so used to one single small screen and average keyboard that it's how I do all my coding, despite having enough money to buy an expensive set up. I find it distracts me from my actual job, which is thinking.
Given I can only reasonably have a single application open (which is an IDE with full documentation/intellisense inside) it means I'm forced to focus, apart from right now obviously.