Never being on call is the ultimate perk.
There are business areas where having an on-call person is unavoidable and necessary.
Programmers are most likely to work from home
341–350 of 377 posts
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#342Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe still not a secret, but the dirty part in some companies is that if there are layoffs, they'll lay off the people who are paid the highest and keep the people that they trained.
Still though, treating all junior developers as competition and your potential replacements, and thus refusing to help them, is shooting yourself in the foot. On the rare chance that you do get laid off, you can always find a new job, but what's much more likely is that a pattern of good mentorship will help you to advance in your career.
Plus those juniors might end up being part of your network next time around!
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#343Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I think for the vast majority of people, it's hard to become a senior or even intermediate developer without some [on the job] mentorship along the way. Doesn't this assume that the only mentorship (edit: We're really talking about "job training") is peer mentorship? What about classes, self-training, etc? Why should the onus be placed 100% on the senior employee? Why no onus on the junior employee?
Downvoters: Consider the context of this thread... Imagine you're asked to train your peers for no extra compensation or credit, and you're still expected to produce 100% of the typical work output. At the same time, your peers are compensated at the same rate, are considered equally for raises and promotions, but are not expected to train anyone. I understand that senior devs might mentor juniors, or that experience…
The issue of having too much work for your time is valid, but it hadn't been raised, as far as I can see, and it's mostly irrelevant whether it's mentoring or any other kind of work.
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#344Earlier quoted context omitted.
How old are you? Meals at work would have appealed to me when I was in my 20s. Now in my 30s and married I wouldn't make use of such a thing even assuming said meals would meet my special diet. I don't eat much and I want to be hungry when I get home in order to sit down to eat dinner with my family. If I ate a full meal at lunch I wouldn't be very hungry for dinner. It would annoy me that I couldn't 'trade' in food…
In my 30s too, but no family, and I eat normal food. I also work out a lot, so there's no problem getting hungry often.
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Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#345Earlier quoted context omitted.
There was recently some evidence that open offices led to reduced collaboration because a real office means asking someone a question disturbs one instead of 20 people. So people end up asking less questions, and interacting with there co-workers less.
That's not surprising. The dogma of open offices assumes that most disruptions are informative, when in fact they're just disruptive.
>...The dogma of open offices assumes that most disruptions are informative
I wonder - does anyone actually believe that anymore? I've always found that to be more the rationalization people use since it sounds good. I've generally found the actual reasons to be more of an attempt to remind employees of hierarchy (make sure the individual contributors know their place), control (much easier to monitor people than if there were actual offices) and cost (giving workers a little table space allows you to pack in 2 or 3 times as many).
Where I am, while the workers dislike the open space for obvious reasons, the managers who have actual offices now seem happier, so I guess that is something.
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#346There is a dirty secret that nobody talks about and the real reason that companies want programmers in the office. Companies want their top performers in the office so they can serve as trainers/mentors/teachers to the new college kids and the incompetent older people they hire. I think this is the real reason companies crack down on working from home. It's infuriating as a top performer - I just want to get my assig…
I'm not sure why you call it a dirty secret. It's not dirty or a secret.
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#347Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are a variety of situations for which direct face-to-face communication, or two people huddling in front of the same computer, is the best low-latency, high-bandwidth mode of communication. I use email all the time, but it's not always the optimal mode of communication. Just yesterday I spent an hour mentoring the most junior member of my team through our tricky dependency injection setup by sitting in front of…
Why couldn't you have provided the same kind of mentoring over email? If you had a guide detailing the steps of the setup your junior developer could follow it. If he or she had any additional questions then he or she could have mailed them to you. I would understand if you said you didn't like typing or that you enjoyed being in proximity of others. But I don't buy the claim that methods other than face-to-face comm…
What you are describing would've taken days, whereas I got him squared away in an hour. I know because he'd already been stuck on it for days, with him asking the occasional question in person and via chat. It wasn't until we sat down together and went through the process of how to make these kinds of modifications step-by-step that he really got it.
We don't have guides for how to make every different potential change to the code. That'd take more time to write than I currently spend coding, and they'd constantly be getting out of date with every refactoring. And anyway, the change I was walking him through was a refactoring of a kind we hadn't yet done before, so no guide would've existed anyway (and, if written, would likely be a one-off). I'm not spending hours writing a speculative guide on how to make that change, which I couldn't even write properly without actually making that change, when it takes much less total time just to sit down with him and work through it together.
I don't understand what programming world you are talking about, because it's completely different from my own. My experience has been that collaborative, high latency development mentorship via email tends to take an order of magnitude more walltime than sitting down and writing the code together end-to-end (similar to "extreme programming", but for mentoring).
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#348Earlier quoted context omitted.
Still though, treating all junior developers as competition and your potential replacements, and thus refusing to help them, is shooting yourself in the foot. On the rare chance that you do get laid off, you can always find a new job, but what's much more likely is that a pattern of good mentorship will help you to advance in your career.
Plus those juniors might end up being part of your network next time around!
And having good peer reviews is helpful for performance reviews and promotion anyway. If everyone you've ever worked with hates you because you go out of your way to not ever be helpful to anyone, your career trajectory is going to be terrible. Working well with others, which includes enabling other members of the team to be maximally productive, is hugely important.
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#349Earlier quoted context omitted.
A significant proportion of the overall HN readership has access to these perks. It's not unreasonable to discuss them in the context of the pros/cons of working from home.
The linked page / disucssion is not for the small percentage of google/fb workers. You are still a minority.
Sure, but I'm not commenting in the discussion on the linked article, I'm commenting here, for which the factors I'm mentioning are relevant to lots of people. If you work at a top tier tech company and live reasonably close to work, working from home doesn't have much draw except possibly if your open office work environment is noisy and distracting.
Re: Programmers are most likely to work from home
#350I'm much happier since I started working remote. I've never been the 9-5 office guy and my coworkers were always joking about me not being in office before 10. When I finally missed a promotion to head of development because the higher ups said it can't be the 10-o-clock guy, I left the company and with it employment in general. As a contractor I can work from wherever I want, get paid much more per month and can kee…
This thread has been eye opening. I had always assumed companies seeking remote employers were looking for cheap labor. Do you have any wisdom to share for someone looking to make the switch to remote?