I don't.
I Miss Working from the Office
291–300 of 502 posts
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#292For me the biggest struggle with working from home has been psychological. I find it much harder to focus for some reason, even with a dedicated room to work in. When I was working in an office my mind would automatically switch to work mode, and I could be productive for 6+ hours. At home for some reason my mind never quite switches into work mode. I've been trying many things and it has gotten better but still not…
Have you tried a morning ritual?
I mean something to prime your brain to "it's work" mode.
I've never had problems with working from home, but reading your post made me think of things which I'm perhaps doing differently. A morning ritual is something I've always done, not intentionally though, it developed organically.
So, I always start work in the same way: make coffee, connect VPN, hook up the tmuxes, start the web browser and start the mail program. (Those processes get purposefully killed every night)
It's just some silly busy work which takes very little time. It is also something I would not do outside of workdays. However, it mimics the things I'd do (and did) at the office.
Also, maybe your dedicated room is too quiet? If you were a cubicle/open landscape worker prior to the pandemic, you surely now lack all kinds of uninteresting and annoying ambient noises, so could it be this silence makes things feel "wrong"? Perhaps a radio on an uninteresting channel might work?
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#293Interestingly, I don't know anybody who misses the office. We're all techies and designers and nobody complained. We do miss having a beer after work every now and then, but we don't miss the office itself at all.
I miss getting out of the house and having a 'clean' space where I can focus on work without any not-work people or not-work distractions around me. I miss the separation between having a work desk with a work computer and a hobby desk with a hobby computer and being physically unable to interact with one while at the other due to them literally being several miles apart. I miss the clear demarcation between Working…
This is why I now work from my own coworking space, while the rest of my company work from home. It's a nice middle ground.
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#294I don't miss the office at all, and I never want to go back. If management asks us to go back full-time, I will start looking for another job. I'm happier and more productive than ever. I never want to go back to rotting in a cube farm pretending that 1-2 productive hours a day is enough. 1. Cubes, cube pods, and "open offices" are inhumane. 2. I don't have to wear headphones to "hear myself think" anymore. 3. Meetin…
Every point you mention is spot-on. Even simple routines like going to the bathroom and eating have so much time shaved off of them. I didn't even realize that 3a was true until you articulated it -- town halls, all-hands, brown-bags, et al., are now a great place to listen in casually but do email hygiene or even some light "real work" without getting judged.
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yet it feels very common to see employers buy subpar equipment, because they either don't understand how much of a difference it makes, or it "costs too much" to give every developer higher quality tools. I'm also in the camp of preferring to work from home with my triple high-res monitor setup, good chair, height adjustable table, ergonomic keyboard/mouse, and so on. I dread the day I'll have to go back to the offic…
It does cost too much for everyone. Unless you are a starting startup ( Now that you say this, I wonder what the threshold is for size/revenue of a company that does prioritize computing equipment and accessories. Every public company I have worked for have cared about ergonomics. Below $50M in revenue/100 employees I’ve found it difficult to request certain equipment (sit-stand desk for example)
The startups I have worked at went out of their way to get top-end equipment for everyone, and especially developers or engineers. They knew they had to move fast.
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#296> I miss productivity! I don't understand the productivity unless you just have bad employees playing games or browsing reddit. My productivity has never been higher. I get more done and have more free time to work on unplanned projects/spikes exploring new tech or rethinking old problems that could be solved better. > I miss having my employer pay for electricity and heat and fast symmetric multi-gigabit Internet ac…
> why not go for a walk, jog, or bike ride?
I do miss the long walks to and from work.
Of course, it's not because of WFH that I'm not doing them, it's because exercising with a mask sucks, so I prefer to do something inside. The OP may be misattributing his feelings.
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#297>I fundamentally do not think remote teams can ever be as productive as in-person teams. Trade an anecdote for an anecdote. We have found our dev team to be exactly as productive if not more since moving to work from home. A single instance of productive remote work invalidates this statement that it is literally impossible for remote work to be productive.
The OP's claim is slightly vague, but would most charitably be read as saying that if you compare all teams (as in the total of all teams around the world), they will perform better in-person than remote, and that this is unlikely to change. You seem to be interpreting the OP as having said that each and every team is always better in-person. Your read is plausible, but HN guidelines say we should interpret charitabl…
Anyway, taking conclusions over what happens to all teams, or the average, or any distribution is a pretty useless task¹. Your work environment won't influence all teams, just yours, so it shouldn't be fit to all.
1 - Unless you are talking about how to tell those teams apart and discover what environment each one fits better. That would be valuable.
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#298Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your work just sounds very subpar. Crippling developers with that sort of equipment and environment is a poor move and also an awful trade-off, business-wise.
I think you mean that the workplace sounds subpar... or do you think it makes the commenter's work product of poor quality, too?
Yes of course, the workplace.
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#299I miss community
Re: I Miss Working from the Office
#300Earlier quoted context omitted.
I miss getting out of the house and having a 'clean' space where I can focus on work without any not-work people or not-work distractions around me. I miss the separation between having a work desk with a work computer and a hobby desk with a hobby computer and being physically unable to interact with one while at the other due to them literally being several miles apart. I miss the clear demarcation between Working…
This is why I now work from my own coworking space, while the rest of my company work from home. It's a nice middle ground.
Pardon my ignorance but I had presumed they had all shut down with indoor dining being shut down. What’s coworking like in a pandemic?