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I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

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Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#271

Post by Freak_NL »

bariswheel wrote: post #213
CephalopodMD wrote: post #119

I 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…

An open office is cheaper to manage for the company. It's all about the bottom line. That's most likely the biggest reason it exists.

It's only cheaper if you leave out the costs of degraded performance, higher turnover in personnel, and being less attractive as an employer. These are not easy to factor in, but the general gist of the last decade seems to be that the (unmitigated) open plan office has an impact on the bottom line. It's just hard to put a number on it, which you can do with concrete items such as floor space or the cost of adding a wall somewhere.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#272

Post by baud147258 »

midrus wrote: post #85

In 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…

for the engineers that I've seen going back to the office (where I work right now, we have the choice of WFH or not, as we wish), I've not seen any correlation. Though I haven't seen any managers coming back, I guess they're happy managing things remotely

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#273

Post by KingMachiavelli »

joelbluminator wrote: post #68

If 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?

Sure but I think that's a good thing. I would rather we slowly lift millions of people out of literal poverty than sacrifice ~5% of our day (1/16 awake hours) in commute just to gatekeep our jobs.

Plus there are other barriers. WFH can be every day except a monthly lunch or social event with the team. Or it's WFH save for on-prem things like hardware upgrades. WFH doesn't have to mean fully remote... just not an office environment.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#274

Post by itronitron »

midrus wrote: post #85

In 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…

My wife has made the same observation in her own workplace and refers to these people as 'the wanderers', although judging by their impact on productive output they should probably be identified as intruders.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#275

Post by tchalla »

rxhernandez wrote: post #188
tchvil wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One programming teacher told me 20 years ago: "you think your technical skills will make you advance your career, wrong, it is your interpersonal ones that will do". I'm not very good at it, but since then I try to work on both sides.

On my second job, I made 2.5x what I made at my first engineering job (which ended 3.5 years ago). At my 3rd job I jumped my salary by 10s of thousands of dollars over what I was making at my 2nd job. At my 4th job, I now make 8x my first job. I am now consulting (with way too many clients) and have the choice of making six figures by working less than 4 months a year. Technical skills almost solely put me in the 1%.…

> Technical skills almost solely put me in the 1%.

What percentile would you rate your technical skills?

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#276

Post by senko »

inter_netuser wrote: post #55
vallavaraiyan wrote: post #46

Unfortunately, there is a drop in empathy and trust (to varying degrees) when interacting with those who one hasn't met in person. Being in office, talking to your teammates face-to-face is super valuable when the team members are new to each other. Once the rapport is established, let each person do what works the best for them.

i wonder how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing, outstaffing, contractors in 5 different timezones, vendors in 12 different timezones, regulators in 3 different time zones, separate divisions for APAC, EMEA, US and so on...? ...but just can't handle remote employees that they have so much more control over? Sounds like complete nonsense to me. If they can handle vendors located on a different…

> ... how companies survived until now with all kinds of outsourcing ...

All of this involves varying degrees of transaction costs (ie. how hard is it to have everone aligned, communicating effectively, etc). Outsourcing is usually done for (parts of) jobs that can be easily carved out into fairly complete packages.

For example, have the QA team offshore, or outsource the design or slide-deck preparation. Most dev outsourcing is also done at least per-component if not per-project.

True distributed teams are HARD. But having everyone aligned, on the same page and motivated, if half (or more) of the team is remote, means a lot more effort on clear communication, management, etc and many office patterns will need reworking.

As one example, onboarding (esp junior) team members is much harder, as new people learn as much by osmosis as by reading the documentation.

This is not to diss WFH - I prefer it to office esp. cubicle hell - but we should be realistic about the challenges involved.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#277

Post by buran77 »

rxhernandez wrote: post #188
tchvil wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One programming teacher told me 20 years ago: "you think your technical skills will make you advance your career, wrong, it is your interpersonal ones that will do". I'm not very good at it, but since then I try to work on both sides.

On my second job, I made 2.5x what I made at my first engineering job (which ended 3.5 years ago). At my 3rd job I jumped my salary by 10s of thousands of dollars over what I was making at my 2nd job. At my 4th job, I now make 8x my first job. I am now consulting (with way too many clients) and have the choice of making six figures by working less than 4 months a year. Technical skills almost solely put me in the 1%.…

Interpersonal skills are like salt in your food. It makes the food better, and sometimes it may cover up some imperfections. Sure, some absolutely bland food will be better to eat than a pile of salt but thinking it has to be one or the other is not the right approach.

For full time employees going through a career with no interpersonal skills is very hard, they stick around with the same bunch of coworkers for a lot longer than consultants. If your technical skills are top notch and you lack interpersonal skills, doing consultancy not only makes more sense financially, it's also much easier.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#278

Post by TheGigaChad »

savant_penguin wrote: post #10
midev wrote: post #5

I've found the WFH debate to be a great proxy for finding people I definitely don't want to work with. Everyone has a preference. But in my experience, the people that whine the most about having to go to an office are generally the people everyone wishes would stay home anyway.

Or that's someone that spends 3h/day commuting

I like how the commuting constantly grows and grows in these threads. We'd probably get to 1 day commute if the topic goes to 1000 comments.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#279

Post by TheOtherHobbes »

seanhandley wrote: post #230
solatic wrote: post #123

Sounds like the relationship is dysfunctional in both directions. On the one hand, the employer set up a panopticon in the office, with crappy furniture, lots of interruptions, a crappy office kitchen, no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home). Garbage in, garbage out. Of course nobody is happy to sit in traffic to come to an environment like that. Then we have the author, who has the mistaken idea that t…

Agreed. It's a false dichotomy that one is better than the other. The only useful way I know to think about it is what my ratio of solo focus time is vs time spent communicating with others. There is a place in the world for people who wait for requirements to appear in their ticket queue, code out solutions, then go home, ad infinitum. But software development tends to work better as a collaborative endeavour. As an…

Communicating/planning/overhead are part of productivity. So are 1 to 1s with good managers.

But the people who wander around telling jokes and drinking coffee are just socialising and (possibly consciously and deliberately) raising their profile.

They're not doing anything of value to others.

Re: I went to the office for the first time. I fucking hated it

#280

Post by WesolyKubeczek »

joelbluminator wrote: post #68

If 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?

> 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?

Has been quite like this since early 2000s.

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