This person has never worked in an office, and has a quiet environment at home. Ah, young and childless.
.. and alone/lonely at home, yet they still prefer it?
I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
251–260 of 479 posts
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#252Would be good to get the opinion of anyone on HN who is in upper management and their feelings on this? What kind of discussions have you and your org been having about WFH? What have you employees been saying, and have you been losing staff over this?
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#253Earlier 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.
Miro.com is a game changer.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#254The simple model I have personally is that my preferences are:
1. Good office environment (including convenient commute).
2. Working from home.
3. Bad office environment.
Some people love WFH simply because they experienced an improvement from 3 to 2 and they don't even know that 1 is possible. For others the order is genuinely different from mine and they would pick WFH over any office. I think this is helpful because office experiences vary a lot and people often end up talking past each other in threads like this one.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#255This monday I had to take a plane to go to the office because I didn't have enough PTO days left.
We must be there for 4 hours every day, and then go back home and keep working for another 4.
This means we have the worst experience of being remote and in an office. The fun part is we're a consultancy firm. I work remotely with customer equipment, I have my dailies with the customer in MSTeams, and I am not expected to go to customer officest for at least 24 months.
Of course, does not make sense to me, nor my manager, or my VP. But the company was bought by a fund 2 months before Covid and the investor wants its money back asap...
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#256I miss being able to tell if I'm interrupting a coworker's state of flow or not with a quick message. When everyone's in the office, I can _see_ when they get back to their desk and haven't gotten into anything again. I can see that my question isn't going to interrupt them. As it stands, I interrupt everyone and they interrupt me. I haven't been able to get into flow during office hours in 18months. Code review disc…
I solved this by creating calendar events for just myself. I’ll book an hour of dedicated programming time and then after that I’ll respond to all of my messages. Or if I don’t need to be hyper focused on a task I’ll bounce around and respond to various messages and check the status of stuff.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#257It is my opinion that if you are against remote work being the norm, you're a dinosaur and best get out of the way of progress. The amount of time people would win back to spend their life however they want by not commuting is astronomical, the environmental impact of not having so many transportation devices on the roads as a result would also be massive. If you somehow think that your need for water-cooler talk is…
Have to agree with this. Exceptions being places where commuting isn't inherently destructive, and actually being in the office is irregular and obviously necessary.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#258Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder how everyone would feel about WFH vs. office if highly paid, highly valued employees weren't forced into literally the smallest possible space for a third of their day. If we all had our own real offices and a work space not architected to be as abusive and "efficient" as possible, would we think differently about how nice it is not to go to the office any more? Likewise for city design where commercial spac…
I think that makes a big difference! Cubicles should be outlawed really, or at least optional. Seems like an archaic thing to me. For my own contracted jobs I went to place that had you choose between an open plan or a small room workplace. All flexible. So I think you are right, if we had more choice, people are happier. Hubs are also a great way forward I think. Maybe there are some exceptions, like high security o…
A cubicle had at least the resemblance of a piece of space I could call my own.
My worst experience involved commuting two hours by train to a high rise, tiny "open plan" office space (read: a few important people got offices, the rest of us were in one not very big room). It was like a sort of torture... for up to 15 hours a day the only escape from being within a several feet of and in eyeline of half a dozen people at least was hiding in a bathroom stall for a few minutes.... and a space which could be mine and any sort of private was usually two hours of a foul smelling, packed, and unstable public transit away. Growing up in an environment where the median number of people within a mile was usually 3... being forced to be constantly "on display" and knowing that there was no escape other than hours of public transit at the end of the day was deeply psychologically unsettling. I lasted about 6 months.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#259Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but the real root cause (of that awful "I am wasting my time and life right now" feeling) is that modern office work often involves getting M hrs (M IMHO it can actually be more frustrating because one feels more on the hook for keeping an eye on notifications. At least at the office I can zone out or focus on something personal or work related, safely assured if a boss really needs me I can be found in person,…
You need a chatbot that replies to messages with "I'm heads down on a task right now. I'll read your message when I have some time. If you need to interrupt me please reply with 'interrupt'." And if you get that keyword your chatbot plays a sound or texts you.
Teams can do this. Create a calendar event or manually set yourself to busy and you will not receive notifications and people can see this. There is also a button on the sender side to mark the message as important to notify anyway.
Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it
#260Seems like their life would be dramatically better if they didn’t have some horrible car hellscape based commute. Pity cities are designed and spread out so because of cars. Then making the office more comfortable and flexible without people micromanaging would be the next thing.
This is U.S. thing, right? People in Europe are using public transportation to get to work from the edge of the city with no problems. Come visit Prague to see how it's done :D
In Madrid (Spain) we have a good radial public transport system.
Works very well if you want to go from/to city center to suburbs.
Nowadays a lot of companies are leaving the city center. Office space is expensive and go to the suburbs or satelite cities.
The radial system does not work anymore: people have to either take the car for a 30-40 minute trip, or spend 1-1:30h to travel to city center then take another transport to the suburbs.