this hurts my wrist, neck, and back to think about
38% of remote workers work from bed
321–330 of 396 posts
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's work from home brilliantly summarized, very true. However, I have my doubts about productivity in smaller teams and startups. Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Sometimes it is important to have an environment where information is exchanged dynami…
> Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? It may change from case to case, but for some small teams the biggest challenge is to produce something so good that it out-competes the produc…
Maybe “meeting” has the wrong shade of meaning here. The comparison isn’t to a pro-forma “let’s sit down for 30 minutes and focus on discussing this” meeting. It’s more to a “war room” continuous-until-it’s-fixed meeting that happens in response to an incident:
• bringing all stakeholders together with exactly one goal (in a startup-as-meeting, that’s “finding product-market fit”),
• where everyone in the room has domain expertise and heavily-overlapping capabilities;
• and any non-shared knowledge relevant to solving the problem that each stakeholder brings in with them, is immediately pulled out and put on the table, until there is formed a complete shared understanding of the problem,
• and micro-tasks / “there’s always another thing” tasks are then being greedy-scheduled by whoever’s free and able jumping to take them on next;
• with everyone keeping track well-enough of what the solution-space for each task is looking like, that at any time the person working on a task can drop it to work on something else more urgent+suited to them, and someone else will be able to immediately pick up that task — not because the other person had the time to document everything and make onboarding to the solution-space easy for them, but rather because everyone was learning all they could about everything everyone else was doing in expectation that they might have to jump in.
In regular work, you do heads-down work and then you explicitly decide to “have a meeting”, which interrupts your heads-down work for a while. In a war room, you’re always “in” the continuous meeting, and people explicitly decide to break off to do heads-down work while the meeting continues around them. (Usually with one ear open to notice if they need to jump back in and contribute/adjust the course of the plans being made.)
For extremely-early-stage startups (i.e. founders and no-one else), this is what every day looks like. Rather than dividing up the problem along lines of domain-expertise (a sort of human Service-Oriented Architecture for problem-solving, with single-person “departments”), you instead essentially act together as one “multi-core person” to solve problems.
IMHO, if this isn’t how most hours of the day at your early-stage startup look, then you either don’t have the right founders, or you don’t have enough shipping pressure (i.e. “too much” runway.)
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#323I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…
I never understand the ability to work on a laptop. For me it would be a significant blow to my productivity. How do people do it? I have 3 full monitors, one for running 10 or so processes that I can glance at stdout, then the other two monitors for having many different editor files open, numerous data plots, and multiple reference guides open, etc.
On windows I alt tab often. I close anything not related to work keeping the list of windows short (maybe 5 at most).
Split screen some where appropriate.
My home office is 2 monitors. My work office is 3, however I only find myself using 2
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#324I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…
I never understand the ability to work on a laptop. For me it would be a significant blow to my productivity. How do people do it? I have 3 full monitors, one for running 10 or so processes that I can glance at stdout, then the other two monitors for having many different editor files open, numerous data plots, and multiple reference guides open, etc.
Different engineers do different work. Not everyone is running 10+ processes and referring to reference guides all day, some, like myself, spend most of our days writing emails or reviewing PRs, neither of which really necessitate lots of screen real estate.
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, it is. For that same amount of money, in my country, i could purchase 2 used cars, or just buy food for about 3 years (without eating out), or pay rent for almost 2 years. Alternatively, such a setup would cost me almost 5 month's worth of net salaries (as a software developer in one of the countries that people outsource to) and that is before any additional shipping costs. Such setups might make sense for peop…
> or pay rent for almost 2 years. What country is that?
Latvia. To give you some perspective, my current net salary is around 1500 euros per month ( the national average is a bit under 1000 https://tradingeconomics.com/latvia/wages ).
Rent in an average small flat is around 300 euros, though could also reach 400 euros or more with heating expenses ( https://m.ss.lv/lv/real-estate/flats/riga/all/fDgTeF4RAzp4FD... some of these adverts list daily prices though ).
Regardless, 7000 USD is around 5900 EUR, so 5900/300 = almost 20 months of rent covered. This also assumes no shipping costs, which might add a bit more.
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#326I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…
> I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; How's your spine? my neck can't handle laptops any more.
To be honest, I am in better shape than I have ever been in my life, but that's cause I'm 43 and rock climb regularly.
IMO, core strength has been the big change in how my spine feels.
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#327I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…
That's work from home brilliantly summarized, very true. However, I have my doubts about productivity in smaller teams and startups. Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Sometimes it is important to have an environment where information is exchanged dynami…
Communication points are a bottleneck. Smaller teams help, but the ideal team size for accomplishing a task is 1.
Putting engineers in a war room or open office is only going to irritate the ones who want to spend their time doing deep work. And those are usually the better ones.
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#328I've been working remote for about 10 years. I've had "real" offices. I've worked in open-plan offices. I've had a home office. I've worked from bed. There are tons of good ways to do it. Lately I swap between a kitchen table and a chair on my porch. I no longer use multiple screens, I've just gotten really fast at swapping windows on my 15" laptop; I've gotten good at figuring out how wide my terminal window breaks…
> I could never have done that when I was in an office. I couldn't take 20 min and play banjo or accordion and come back to my problem with a fresh eye I mean ... you could.
I should say, "I wouldn't have felt free to do that in the situations I've been in".
And maybe that's just a supposition that I was making.
People pay me to play music-- it's not that I'm bad at it. But there are a lot of reasons ranging from not annoying other folks to not looking like I care more about playing scales than fixing a problem which make me think I should not do that kind of thing.
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Being in the same space physically I think speeds up a lot of things. In small teams and esp. at early stage startups your whole day is a meeting where things are discussed and resolved spontaneously. Who's going to write the fine-detail code if they whole day is a meeting? It may change from case to case, but for some small teams the biggest challenge is to produce something so good that it out-competes the produc…
Maybe “meeting” has the wrong shade of meaning here. The comparison isn’t to a pro-forma “let’s sit down for 30 minutes and focus on discussing this” meeting. It’s more to a “war room” continuous-until-it’s-fixed meeting that happens in response to an incident: • bringing all stakeholders together with exactly one goal (in a startup-as-meeting, that’s “finding product-market fit”), • where everyone in the room has do…
War room is an excellent term in this case, thank you. Going to use it from now on. And this:
> Usually with one ear open to notice if they need to jump back in and contribute/adjust the course of the plans being made.
is precisely what I was trying to describe here in the comments. Thanks again.
Re: 38% of remote workers work from bed
#330My entire back twinged when I read this headline. It sounds awful. I have a work chair at my desk for work posture. Sit up or get up.
I feel the exact opposite: My back twinges when I think about sitting in the same position for hours. Working with a single laptop (without external screens, mouse, or keyboard) I can switch from bed to couch to desk multiple times per day.
I can't do more than 5 minutes of laptop in bed, so I do somewhat envy your setup that apparently isn't awful for computing. But I'm also in the "don't laptop in bed" category so I may not have been motivated to solve it.