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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

#301

Post by MrDresden »

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.

True, but less office space is cheaper than even that.

My employer is looking into allowing 3-4 days remote each week going forward and is then expecting they can downsize their offices to save money.

Would 100% remote be better? For some. For others who don't have the means to work at home, they need the office.

The open office environment is completely detrimental to good deep work though.

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

#302

Post by tester34 »

ohhnoodont wrote: post #160
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…

This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined. I don't necessarily see this as a bad thing. Many of us moved here and joined competitive, demanding companies. People bond in these situations. I really look forward to being back in the office and having a significant part of my social life return. Don't…

>This may just be my experience as a young person in San Francisco / Silicon Valley, but it's very common for office life and social life to be highly intertwined.

Damn, I've seen some random ass video on yt called "normal day of Googler" or something like that and it shocked me hard that "normal day" meant hanging out with coworkers

Don't get me wrong, it's not like we don't do it "here" - like going to pub or something, but it's definitely not normal day.

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

#304

Post by yobbo »

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…

> Just the people that have nothing to show at the end of the quarter.

These positions are part of the incentive system: "if you're loyal and work hard, you might one day get a job like that." For most people, being able to lord over others is very seductive and motivating.

The managers just want to continue to experience what they construe as their "reward" for loyal careers.

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

#305

Post by smcl »

mrweasel wrote: post #199
aba_cz wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

> People in Europe are using public transportation No we don't. It would add 90 minutes each way for my 15km commute. We really need to stop with the idea that public transportation in Europe is awesome, it not, it actually pretty terrible outside a few select areas. It's actually faster to ride a bike to work in my case, except bikes aren't allowed on the motorway. Europe need to fix it's public transportation syste…

I think the problem is someone in Prague can say "Public transport in Europe is cheap, frequent and reliable" when talking about their experience and be totally correct ... while someone in some British cities can say "Public transport in Europe is actually expensive and quite unreliable" and also be correct from their experience. I think that at least in central Europe if you randomly select a city with >100k people you're likely to find that there's a good bus/trolley/tram network that can take you to your work - I don't know about Mediterranean countries, the Balkans or Scandanavia.

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

#306

Post by caffeine »

benrbray wrote: post #127
vinni2 wrote: post #112

One thing I noticed is that while more experienced people are productive working from home, it is devastating for fresh starting employees. Work from home eliminates learning through osmosis. If anyone has a work around this let me know. I am surprised no one else has mentioned it here.

I graduated into this mess and feel like I've been cut off at the knees.

Hey I really feel for you. Please don’t disengage, fight hard to get mentored.

Not sure what your org is like but ask to pair remotely if you can, ask to do code reviews over video call so you can talk through questions, ask your manager regularly to talk you through the trade offs involved in the decisions they are making, etc. If you hear about a weekly status call happening on some project, ask if you can be included “to learn.”

Your goal is to first increase your situational awareness and understanding of the domain, because that is upstream of the technical trade offs.

I think people graduating into this have to fight really hard for the mentorship and learning that would happen naturally 10 years ago.

People like me who graduated 10-15 years ago and would now naturally be your mentors don’t realise this because we never faced it.

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

#307

Post by Zababa »

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…

> no decent food (i.e. needing to bring food from home)

I think there's just no food at all at the office. Most offices work that way, at least where I live (France).

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

#308

Post by thevagrant »

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…

1. An office with four walls, a door that can be closed is helpful but as a _minimum_ I'd also want:

2. Pristine bathrooms

3. Clean kitchen and good supply of tea/coffee (with ample space for those to store or prepare their food hygenically).

The amount of places I've worked that can't provide 2 and 3 is saddening. Nothing worse than being stuck in a dirty smelly place, hanging around to get points for presenteeism.

No I'm gonna get on a rant.

Why is it that my home network is superior to the crappy wifi at the office?

Why with my limited salary can I setup a better desk with much better screens / computing equipment than my employer provides?

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

#310

Post by Zababa »

itronitron wrote: post #284
amdelamar wrote: post #44

> The best part is that the cubicle doesn't have tall walls so I can literally see/hear everything, including other people's monitors. Open offices are awful. In my experience most people end up wearing headphones all day, and I did too. My ears would get red and irritated after a while. But I'd keep them on because it was like an unspoken social rule; that if you looked busy and had headphones on, people won't inter…

I wonder if wearing a reflective face shield would be a more effective deterrent to interruptions. If people can't see your face then they would probably be much less likely to engage in conversation. You could just take a normal face shield and put reflective sunscreen window film on the inside.

I think this would work the opposite way because people would think it's a great conversation starter.
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