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People love working remotely

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Re: People love working remotely

#311

Post by flavor8 »

donretag wrote: post #270

I have been working remotely for 3-4 years, and I am currently job hunting. I did not like working remotely honestly. As an extrovert, I did not like the isolation. However, the major drawback was not being able to steer any of the tech/political discussion because I was remote. I had poor managers/CTO that needed a good smack to the head because they were too scatterbrained, but I was not there to do it. Impossible…

It sounds like your team is mixed between on-site and remote. I've never seen that work well - you need to at minimum have a remote-first team or department for effective communication processes to be engrained. Otherwise, the co-located team ends up having a lot of watercooler conversations that exclude remote, and that throws off the balance.

Re: People love working remotely

#312

Post by aserafini »

lobotryas wrote: post #160
aNoob7000 wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A face to face meeting is no silver bullet either. I've been to many meeting where someone with a strong opinion and with the manager's blessing takes over the conversation/agenda. What I like about an email is that it allows you time to digest the information and then respond to someone.

It’s almost like both approaches have their pros, cons, and appropriate times when they should be used. I like a combined arms approach. Start an email thread and if there is no timely reply, or consensus is getting hard to reach, walk over to the other person’s desk for a chat or call a meeting.

Exactly. The ‘best’ communication method for an issue is entirely contextual.

Re: People love working remotely

#313

Post by filoleg »

Consultant32452 wrote: post #162
dustinmoris wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big boss said "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" I can't believe that people who are so out of touch with reality are still given so much responsibility at companies which they effectively unknowingly misuse to make everyone's life miserable. There's nothing wrong about a multi day email chain. Sometimes it's the best communication tool, because non-critical/important things can b…

I get 100+ emails per day. I'm almost certainly not reading the multi day email chain unless someone IMs me to ask for my input on it.

That's what email rules are for. If there is a long email chain and I am not directly @mentioned in the body of the email, it automatically gets filtered away into a separate folder and stays unread there, while my inbox stays clean and up to date.

If my participation is actually needed in the thread, I will be inevitably @mentioned by someone, and the email stays in my main inbox folder.

Re: People love working remotely

#314

Post by Diederich »

BjoernKW wrote: post #303
g051051 wrote: post #16

I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my car and clothes, I had extra time that I wasn't wasting on my commute, etc. Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being off…

> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged: Why is it better? Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up? If so how often does this happen? Why does t…

> Why is it better?

Maybe it is, maybe it isn't, but being remote does not exclude having face to face meetings. There is (finally) easy and reliable technology that facilitates that very thing.

Highly diverse timezones can be a problem, but I've never know anybody working remotely to resist attending a relatively rare video conference call in order to quickly hash something out.

Re: People love working remotely

#315

Post by ghostbrainalpha »

Phillips126 wrote: post #183
g051051 wrote: post #16

I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my car and clothes, I had extra time that I wasn't wasting on my commute, etc. Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being off…

I'm on my 2nd week back on-site after being remote for nearly 2 years, it's been a tough transition. On-top of getting what feels like a large pay-cut (1 hour commute, car maintenance/fuel, etc) and having to deal with a cramped cubicle in a noisy area, I feel that my family life is also suffering. My office hours end later than I like (5pm) and with my commute I am home just in time for dinner and to put my young ki…

That's why you need some sort of productivity journal.

Show that you were completing X number of tasks per month, and after a couple months show them that your productivity is down 10-20% in terms of tasks completed.

Make it extremely easy to present, and if your Manager agrees to work with you on it, make it look like the work to compile this report was all theirs. In other words make them look good and do their job for them.

My FAVORITE EXAMPLE in the road map for Star Citizen. That game's development is at an agonizingly slow pace, but if you were the Manager who put together their roadmap it would be instant promotion. It's goddamn BEAUTIFUL. And their is no way the team could be fucking up if the Roadmap looks this good.

https://robertsspaceindustries.com/roadmap/board/1-Star-Citi...

Re: People love working remotely

#316

Post by hinkley »

BjoernKW wrote: post #303
g051051 wrote: post #16

I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my car and clothes, I had extra time that I wasn't wasting on my commute, etc. Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being off…

> "a 15 minute fact-to-face is better than a multi-day email chain" This truism seems to never get old. It's carelessly tossed about but never proven. It's mostly just accepted as-is and hardly ever challenged: Why is it better? Do you really have be in the office every day, the whole day, just because a situation where a "15 minute face-to-face" is required might come up? If so how often does this happen? Why does t…

There are times when a face to face sorts out problems like nothing else, but there are a lot of people who value face-to-face over all else who are using those situations in bad faith. They know some social engineering tricks and they use little meetings as a stopgap for big deficiencies in other areas.

Developers are smart. You might con them into a bad idea in that 15 minute meeting, but someday they'll figure out they've been had. Most won't take it lying down.

In my experience, and talking to my peers, engineers don't come straight at you when they feel slighted. Especially if you're a big talker. They may not even gloat when they feel that the odds have been evened up. Not all 'bad luck' in companies is just bad luck. Some of it is work stoppage or malicious compliance by someone with a grievance who doesn't enjoy confrontation.

Re: People love working remotely

#317

Post by nerdkid93 »

hanley wrote: post #293
teddyuk wrote: post #113

Having millions of people regularly commuting into major cities is a disaster. You create all this traffic, congestion on trains, sometimes people packed liked sardines for what? To sit in an office and work less than you would in the peace and quiet at home. Much better if governments encouraged people to work from home, maybe have local hubs where people can go to if they can't work at home. Cut down on the traffic…

Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker is pushing a tax credit for employers who allow employees to work remotely as a strategy for reducing transportation congestion. I'm not sure I agree with the technique but it is an interesting idea to create financial incentives that encourage remote work. https://www.wbur.org/bostonomix/2019/07/25/governor-baker-wo...

That seems like it just subsidizes the cost of suburbanizing a city, though.

Re: People love working remotely

#318

Post by mcguire »

targonca wrote: post #253
g051051 wrote: post #16

I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my car and clothes, I had extra time that I wasn't wasting on my commute, etc. Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being off…

>white noise over the speakers W-what? I know some people swear that white noise makes them concentrate better, but forcing everyone to listen to white noise? Wtf. I'm not even sure that's legal from an occupational health & safety standpoint.

NASA Enterprise Applications Competency Center (yes, that's a thing), Marshall Space Flight Center Bldg. 4601.

Offices for the important people, high cubicles for semi-important people, shorter cubicles for the peons. White noise generators to reduce the excess conversation interruptions. (It didn't help me, my cube was outside one of the few large, unallocated meeting rooms, which got used by everyone at MSFC. I got to listen to the meetings until I started working from home.) Oh, and the AC goes off at 3:00p.m. to save money. By 5:00, everyone still working is rather sweaty.

Re: People love working remotely

#319

Post by joezydeco »

targonca wrote: post #253
g051051 wrote: post #16

I was full-time WFH for 6 wonderful years. I was happy, my productivity was off the charts, I was saving tons of money because I didn't have to spend it on my car and clothes, I had extra time that I wasn't wasting on my commute, etc. Then, we had a big shake-up. A bunch of senior people left, and new "leadership" came in to "transform" our workplace. All WFH was cancelled in our division (in spite of still being off…

>white noise over the speakers W-what? I know some people swear that white noise makes them concentrate better, but forcing everyone to listen to white noise? Wtf. I'm not even sure that's legal from an occupational health & safety standpoint.

It's the most common kneejerk reaction to employees that complain that the open office is too noisy - that loud conversations in the room or, hell, right over your shoulder are distracting you from focusing properly on your work.

Instead of investigating the social fixes to the problem (asking people to take phone calls in private rooms, having arguments/meetings in private rooms, enabling sidetone in noise-cancelling headphones so people don't scream into conference calls), the proposed answer is a Simple Little Widget(tm) they can buy that will fix everything: the white noise generator.

Except now you have a layer of white noise on top of all the loud conversations. And white noise doesn't mask human speech at all unless it's louder than the speech itself. So nothing is fixed.

Re: People love working remotely

#320

Post by voxl »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #12
duiker101 wrote: post #2

I love remote work too. But I strongly believe it's not for everyone. Not even 50% of the population. It would be a mistake to assume that it's easy for everyone. For me, going in the office means putting my headset on and doing my work till I need to leave, while having as few interactions as possible; so there are pretty much only perks on working from home. Most people crave engagement without even realizing it. I…

Totally agree. I love remote work but you have to be cut out for it. A lot of people aren’t. I also may enjoy going to an office more if I actually had an office with a window where i could feel comfortable instead of staring at a gray cube wall and listening to my loud neighbors the whole day.

These strange claims with no evidence. Working from home has to fight existing inertia, you couldn't WFH prior to the internet age, so no one did. Now it's possible and suddenly not everyone is cut out for it.

Not everyone is cut out for a 9 to 5, not everyone is a morning person, not everyone likes sitting in a chair all day. But they deal with it, because it's their job. The same will be 100% true for WFH, cut out for it or not, they'll adapt and make it work.

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