After starting working from home i got to quit a adiction that was ruining my life, i got to threat my depression with the first signs of success in a long time, i will fight for my home office like my life depends on it, because it might very well do
Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
321–330 of 371 posts
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#322The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office. I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and wor…
100% agree on the non-separation of "home" and "work" being terrible. It's easy to say "just don't work after 5/6/whatever" but in practice not having a physical separation between "this is where I work" and "this is where I don't work" makes that mental switch damn near impossible. I've ended up working far more hours since the pandemic started than I did previously, and when I'm "done" working, I'm still thinking a…
> in practice not having a physical separation between "this is where I work" and "this is where I don't work" makes that mental switch damn near impossible.
A good way to enforce this separation is by hardware. (This has many other benefits as well.)
I have a work laptop which is for work only (provided by employer). I switch it on at 9am and I turn it off when the day is done. My own machines are mine, no work or work-related communication happens on them, ever.
While these machines are only a few feet away from each other, once the work laptop is off, it's off.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#323At the start of the pandemic, I knew I would miss working with people in person, but thought I would be totally great with WFH. Now, I know that I badly need some amount of in-person time with my coworkers on a weekly basis, or I go crazy. It's a motivational thing for me. I thrive on solving problems for and with other people, and there's an "out of sight, out of mind" effect for me over zoom. It's just harder for m…
Consider yourself lucky to be working at a company where you would even want to be around the other staff I guess.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#324> When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually.
I'm the opposite, its work and everything is a transaction.
Nothing worse than pointless 'hi how are you?' Slack messages where the other person doesn't give a shit about your response, just ask your question as concisely as possible.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#325As someone who prefers private offices to cubicles and cubicles to open offices, I prefer working from home purely because it’s the only way to balance the business’s unwillingness to pay for private offices with my unwillingness to work in an open bullpen.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#326Depends on the days really, I generally don't like WFH anymore (was fine during lockdown#1); I am going to the office daily now, even when it's empty. Better lights, better desks, a monitor, seats, noise. I do quite like hiding away in a coffee/restaurant etc, if I don't have meetings. But having a buzz and people around is important indeed.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#327Working from home means I get to see my wife and children for more hours of the day. It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. I've been working from home for over six years. I never want to return to the office. I will change careers before I return to a software development office.
> It also means that I get to choose when I will allow myself to be interrupted, rather than sitting in an open concept office and being _continually_ interrupted. This is extremely situational. When I was in a larger house and had no kids, WFH was an easy way to avoid interruptions. Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extrem…
> Moving to a smaller house (more expensive city) and having kids flipped the situation around. Avoiding interruptions at home was extremely difficult because I was always only a door away from someone asking a “quick favor”.
IMO full remote can eliminate the need to live in a small house in an expensive city.
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#328The pandemic really helped me confirm that I prefer the office. I always sought to establish a clear distinction between my work life and home life and the enforced work from home due to COVID has made the two blur to a point now where I feel like I've lost all rhythm. Now living through a pandemic itself has a way of disrupting the rhythm of life but I feel that the collapsing of space into a singular living and wor…
I think the trick is to separate your home office from your home-home well enough to create compartmentalization.
The President of the United States has worked from home for centuries, but the Oval Office and West Wing are well separated from the residence. “Oh, but I don’t have room in my West Coast studio apartment to do that.” If you’re working remote, why are you in a West Coast studio apartment?
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#329Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We have an agreement that @'ing/DM'ing is expected to be asynchronous unless you explicitly let the recipient know otherwise How does this work? Becuase the problem as a recipient is that now I still need to read every.single.message.all.the.time to see what it says, which is ridiculous waste of time and source of continuous interruption. I much prefer to check email + slack once or twice a day at most, batch proce…
I find this response (which I see a lot) mystifying. When you have a moment, read the message. Go back to what you were doing before. It literally takes seconds to read a message and decide “is everything on fire and I need to respond to this or can it wait until later”. Mostly, it can wait. If it can wait, wait. Ignore it. Go back to what you were doing. Take your time folk, you dont have to respond to every email o…
> If it can wait, wait. Ignore it. Go back to what you were doing.
You make it sound like this part is zero-cost, when it absolutely is not.
This comic expresses it more clearly than I could in words: https://heeris.id.au/2013/this-is-why-you-shouldnt-interrupt...
Re: Poll: Do you prefer the office or work from home?
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Going to an office to write software is absolutely insane. Why? Writing software, especially in a large organization, is often an inherently social job, just like many others. You often need heads down time to actually get into flow and produce code, but that doesn't mean interaction with others isn't a significant part of it as well.
Linux kernel team seems to manage fine. Or maybe they'd all do better if they were in a big open office with Linus Torvalds.
Managing fine is different than it being insane to go into an office. And I don't know on what basis we can conclude that it wouldn't be better if core Linux devs were working together.
I don't know much about the nitty gritty of what kernel deving looks like, but it's possible that the work there looks more like longer stretches of heads down time than average. E.g., I can imagine you could be pretty impactful being heads down for weeks or months at a time micro-optimizing the performance of various components. I think this tends not to be true of most software.
One thing I do know about the social dynamics of Linux development is that Linus can be an asshole and flame at people a lot. You could worry that this would be more intense and thus worse in an office, but IME this kind of stuff tends to get better once people can see each other as actual humans and not just text on a screen.