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Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

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Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#411

Post by kmlx »

raywu wrote: post #362
A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is an interesting question. I have two new team members we added 2 months ago. Neither is very technical and, admittedly, it can get challenging sometimes, because pre-WFH, I could have just showed them what to do instead of spending 20 minutes trying to explain what I want them to do. I could technically grab a screen, but.. apparently, neither learns well that way and just yesterday I had some really odd issues…

Unrelated: how do you remember your username?

or you never log out

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#412

Post by ghaff »

mandelbrotwurst wrote: post #339
ghaff wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, as a long-term essentially remote employee, IMO you need to have week-long team meetings. Probably quarterly. I hesitate to require weekends. On the other hand, I have traveling about 130 days per year pre-pandemic.

Why do you need week long meetings ?

First off, take "week-long" as maybe a few days--perhaps a combination of broader team, smaller teams, and other syncs. Why more than one day? It's just more efficient if people are going to travel anyway. Especially long distances.

People are social and, in my experience, remote interactions work better when people have previously connected in-person.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#413

Post by [deleted] »

fshbbdssbbgdd wrote: post #291
toomuchtodo wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://theboatgalley.com/establishing-residency-at-st-brend... This makes Florida your domicile, so no state income taxes (but, of course, you're paying Federal taxes regardless of where you reside in the world). The mail processor in question caters specifically to cruisers/yachties and RVers. Give the address to work and family, no one knows you're living the digital nomad life unless you share. Get a Schwab or Fi…

Is this recommending that you lie and say you live on this island? If lots of people are doing it with the same island, might some tax agency get wise and audit everyone with that address? I see how one could, in theory, easily get away with a fake residency while remote working, but sharing the same address with many others and posting about it online seems like asking for trouble.

[deleted]

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#414

Post by intricatedetail »

rootusrootus wrote: post #343
tills13 wrote: post #325

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TBH your personal experience has no bearing on mine. I can't help but feel like people with _opinions_ like yours are going to ruin it for the rest of us who are orders of magnitude more productive at home. "But I can't socialize"... I don't care. I would rather not work in tech anymore than return to an office full time.

> _opinions_ like yours are going to ruin it for the rest of us I guess we will find out in the next couple years who just has a terrible _opinion_ and who is 'the rest of us.' You may not like how that turns out.

Or that managers find out that extroverts create distraction and ruin productivity thus the numbers and their bonuses...

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#415

Post by JohnWhigham »

GongOfFour wrote: post #232
cactus2093 wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NYC summers are a special kind of hell beyond the heat and humidity That is absolutely wild to me. I also lived in NYC for 10 years, the summers there are magical. The city comes alive in such a unique way, people are outside relaxing in the parks, having backyard and rooftop parties, heading out to the beach on the weekends. There are a bunch of great weekend trips to be had a few hours away by train in Long Islan…

Did you commute every day on the subway? If so how long? I lived in NYC for 10 years and I hated the summer daily commute because all that aliveness led to hangovers and me sweating all that magicalness out daily on my walk and wait on the platform. You aren't wrong that NYC is great in the summer but it's also a special kind of hell with heat and humidity. Both can be true.

The trick is to keep NYC at an arm's length. Waiting for the Metro North in that dank cavern is more bearable when you only do it for pleasure and not business.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#416

Post by steveBK123 »

bradlys wrote: post #347
anyfoo wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Unlimited" vacation time is so bizarre to me, it almost seems like a scam to me. Obviously it's not legally binding, otherwise a malicious employee could not work a single day and legally not face repercussions. But in Germany at least, vacation days are a matter of law. The number of days per year is part of the contract, and there is a strict minimum of 24 days (at least in Bavaria). It is as far as I know not leg…

Unlimited vacation time can be better than what some companies offer as standard. In the US, two weeks (or none) is the norm. 3 weeks is decent. 4 weeks is considered exceptional. (You might even get some holidays too) The standard amount in the US basically just sucks and there’s almost no employer offering European levels of time off as a standard. Unlimited is where you suddenly can hit 5+ weeks if you get the rig…

I work in an industry where 4-5 weeks off plus federal holidays and sick days is not uncommon for senior engineers.

What I have found is that "unlimited" actually works the opposite as it's more of a thing you have to ask for. With an amount spelled out it feels more like a fixed allocation you are entitled to and that you are deducting from. If you have the wrong manager (and good luck sniffing this out in interviews), it turns into a competition of who can use the least.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#417

Post by adventureadmin »

A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote: post #260

My company has already started its effort to bring all of us back in. There are some exceptions, but it is not clear, who can get it, so it is the usual corporate free for all, which means basically what it always did.. if boss likes us you, they may bestow a favor upon you. Throughout the entire pandemic experience I have become noticeably more cynical, but I have to admit I did not see the ridiculous corporate prop…

> if boss likes us you, they may bestow a favor upon you.

That's the rub with job as well, management simply can't follow their own return-to-office policy uniformly without bleeding talent, which is clearly going to lead to a lot of disgruntled coworkers. It's frustrating too because we have both productive and unproductive employees advocating for remote.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#418

Post by steveBK123 »

thegginthesky wrote: post #328
steveBK123 wrote: post #307

It cuts both ways. I love WFH and would love to do it indefinitely. Used to do it 1-2 days/week at prior job. My wife and I are both ICs and introverts, and happy to have the space/privacy/quiet. However, my firm especially is really taking advantage of it. They are getting far more work out of us while acting like they are doing us a favor by not dragging us back yet. Meeting load is up 25-50%, but story points per…

About the meeting load proble, this was actually happening with me a bit before 2021 so I did the most sane thing: I talked with my manager and my manager's boss about it in a non-confrotarional way. Turns out both of them and 80% of my coworkers felt the same way, so we decided to trim down meetings to the bare minimum,arrange them so they are close to each other, and the company had to instate that meetings need a…

Agreed, the meeting load waxes&wanes.. we at one point had mandatory team-wide agile meetings of one form of another for about 9 hours/week. I managed to push that down to 5 hours/week, but other stuff creeps in. We all feel the same way, and management is aware but it's hard to get meetings removed until it becomes bosses idea, so it is often 6 months of suggestion before reality.

Often the response to high meeting load for ICs is management telling us how many more hours of meetings they have!

Agreed about after-hours comms, though sometimes it then becomes a Friday 5pm or Thursday 6:45pm call to the cell instead, which never happened in the before times.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#419

Post by seoaeu »

doublerabbit wrote: post #403
gerdesj wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"but working from home for only a year, in pandemic conditions" About 18 months here (UK.) I'm a business owner (IT services) and I now do see the value of WFH. I really, really know the upsides and the downsides. My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. Call it what you will but when you are sat in a room at home which may not be very comfortab…

> My staff don't go off the boil when they are at home - they lose it and drift off when they don't feel ... loved. I just want my own personal home space back. Powering down the laptop for the weekend and hiding it is not the same as leaving it locked up at the office. With WFH and my single bedroom apartment, I feel I've lost privacy, personal space that I had once earned. And it's driving my depression insane know…

Yeah, the "I spend 20+ hours a day in the same room" realization hits hard.

Re: Facebook extends its work-at-home policy to most employees

#420

Post by slumdev »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #373
dreyfan wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Uhh, I'm a real person with a clean record? There's no way for a company to ask the IRS if a person has multiple employers.

They can ask Equifax though (assuming your employer participates): https://theworknumber.com/

You can (and should) freeze your Work Number file.

https://theworknumber.com/employee-data-freeze/

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