421–430 of 502 posts
I don't plan on ever going back to the office. HOWEVER, it is possible that a company could entice me to come in to the office, and here's how: - Stop with the ridiculous open office plans - If you have free snacks or a machine with Monster energy drinks, don't get rid of those things a year after instating them - Give my team a budget for tools, like if we need Parallels or Sketch, and make that budget transparent -…
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Your work just sounds very subpar. Crippling developers with that sort of equipment and environment is a poor move and also an awful trade-off, business-wise.
I have to say employees are just as silly sometimes. All my life I've always just bought the stuff I need and took it to work. No matter where I've worked it was 1/100th the hassle to do that rather than figure out how to go through channels. I've also tried stuff and ditched it a few weeks later and tried something else. this applies to lots of things at work -- who cares if the office pens are free - they suck.
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> Because you're there to work. That’s such a weird accusation. No I’m not. I get paid to work, and I do good work, but I am not there to work . My goal in life is not “to work”. That sounds absolutely miserable.
If you weren’t paid and wouldn’t work, would you still go to the same office, and would they allow you there? If not, you are probably there to work.
If you were paid and work there, but every time you did something that looked like socialising someone would come over and tell you to stop, reminding you that you are there to solely to work, would you stay there?
If you'd leave, you are probably not there solely to work.
I don't miss the office at all, and I never want to go back. If management asks us to go back full-time, I will start looking for another job. I'm happier and more productive than ever. I never want to go back to rotting in a cube farm pretending that 1-2 productive hours a day is enough. 1. Cubes, cube pods, and "open offices" are inhumane. 2. I don't have to wear headphones to "hear myself think" anymore. 3. Meetin…
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Then and now it all comes down to just “people near you”. You didn’t choose your village mates, you were born into it. You have more flexibility now, but you’re still just working with people you didn’t choose. Finding your role in a relatively small group of people describes most of my experience working in offices. You share the time and experiences doing some thing you have to do, not something you want to do. Loc…
But "back then" you would likely get to know them much more than you do your work colleagues. Note I'm not saying it was better, but it was definitely closer than the average work relationship today. You'd likely know their children and their relatives, share festivities etc. You can do that with workmates now but it's entirely optional, whereas before it effectively wasn't. And you would do it over decades. > Locati…
I assure you a fair number of office workers have come close enough to "your belly going hungry", and its modern extension "struggling to pay the rent and bills", that they are quite motivated to keep the job they have.
Probably not HN tech workers so much. But even some of those will have struggled for basics at some time or other.
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Your work just sounds very subpar. Crippling developers with that sort of equipment and environment is a poor move and also an awful trade-off, business-wise.
Agreed that good equipment is a worthwhile investment, but unfortunately most companies don't see it that way. I'm now in management and get issued a standard option 13" Macbook Pro or Dell XPS13 as my system at both my current and prior company, both of which I'm permanently remote. That honestly does the trick because other than how shitty Electron is for memory consumption, I don't do the things as a manager that…
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I work for a global 500 company, specialized in producing large technical equipment for aerospace. Our core activity is engineering and industrial production. For the area it's not a shitty company, the conditions are good and they have no trouble attracting employees. In the engineering department those who don't do 3d CAD get a single 20" screen, and a laptop with 8Gb RAM. Those who use CAD get a single 24" screen…
I worked at a aerospace defense contractor 8 years ago and this tracks with my experience. The quality of the equipment is terrible as is the pay in comparison to jobs with similar qualifications. I understand the economics of why these jobs suck, but there's no reason to stay. 8 years ago I had to move from an area I liked to get a better job. It will be interesting to see what happens with the rise of more remote h…
I've heard stories about "water clubs" and "coffee clubs" because some companies are so cheap they don't even pay for bottled water machines - so the employees group together and pay for it themselves. Like WTF?! And a couple of these stories came from programmers too.
As far as I know, we get paid better, have free basics like that (there was free lunch before covid), and whenever we carry our equipment to test sites, it's usually several generations newer and better than anything else I see at those sites. It's kinda funny lol.
It's a bit of a golden handcuffs thing I suppose. The problem is even if they pay better than anyone else in the space industry, I could probably double my compensation by getting a job at google. Of course, landing an interview at google in itself seems nearly impossible.
Sometimes I wonder if having a space company on your resume is a bad mark for hiring managers at companies like google. It kinda feels that way. Like as if only the riff raff work at space companies. But there are a lot of us who just wanted to work on cool stuff lol.
I don't miss the office at all, and I never want to go back. If management asks us to go back full-time, I will start looking for another job. I'm happier and more productive than ever. I never want to go back to rotting in a cube farm pretending that 1-2 productive hours a day is enough. 1. Cubes, cube pods, and "open offices" are inhumane. 2. I don't have to wear headphones to "hear myself think" anymore. 3. Meetin…
At my previous job, I worked from home 2-3 days a week and commuted (~50 minutes each way) the rest of the time, then I took a new job less than ten minutes from home. We got sent home due to COVID a few months after that. Management talks a lot about how they know remote isn't ideal and want to get us back in the office as soon as possible, despite most of the software teams finding they've been equally or more productive as before.
For me, this has been the first time I've been WFH on an equal footing with the whole team, I _love_ it, and I never want to go back to the office. I actually prefer meeting via Teams since I can't hear well and the built in captioning makes it easier, I have better monitors at home than I do at the office, there's never a wait for the bathroom, can pull some lunch out of the fridge or pantry and heat it up at my convenience.
I know some people lament the whole "not having hallway conversations leading to innovation" thing but I'm honestly curious how real that is. I've been in the industry for over 20 years now, the bulk of that in software-focused companies or teams, and while I do have casual conversations with coworkers I can't recall any of them ever segueing into "so here's the challenging thing I'm working on right now..." -- I'm not saying it never happens, just that I can't recall it's ever happened to me.
Some of my coworkers do miss whiteboarding, though I don't have strong feelings about that one way or the other. I'm more of a textual than a visual thinker personally so I've never found diagramming things out to be particularly helpful.
At any rate, while I really like my boss and my team, the day management sends out the "mandatory full-time return to the office in (x) months, including the development teams" email is almost certainly going to be the day I update my resume.
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And that is horrible. But there are a lot of folk who feel lonely from WFH who are not like that. The comment was insulting because it implied that if you're lonely from working from home it must be because you lack a social life. You can have a thriving social life and still miss the social aspect of an office.
If you have a robust social / family life outside of work, and you are lonely now, it’s probably because of COVID stay-at-home and not because of WFH.
There are people for whom being stuck in their WFH area for 8 hours a day 5 days a week with no social interactions is very unpleasant, even if after work they have a robust social / family life. Some of them were reporting this doing WFH prior to Covid.
The most amazing social life outside work won't compensate for that daily gap which occupies about half of their waking hours.
Some people need more regular personal interactions throughout the day than that.
On top of that, some people's work creativity or mental stimulation thrives on social interactions with colleagues in the same or related work domain. A social life with friends and family does not substitute for "work-oriented social interactions" with people who are grinding on the same kinds of problems, for example drinking buddies with whom you can discuss code. It doesn't really matter if these people are long term friends, as it's a different kind of stimulation.