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Is going to the office a broken way of working?

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Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#431

Post by brewdad »

qwerty456127 wrote: post #419
ericmay wrote: post #401

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, you just don’t want to get vaccinated. Everything else is window dressing around that. The virus will mutate and continue to do so. Eventually your immunity will weaken - will you get the vaccine then? Doubt it. You’ll make up another excuse then instead. And let’s not pretend you are any more informed about this vaccine than you are any other “highly tested” one. You have no scientific or educated reasoning here…

> No, you just don’t want to get vaccinated. Everything else is window dressing around that. And I have no rational reason to, except artificial reasons created by most of governments. > The virus will mutate and continue to do so. Eventually your immunity will weaken - will you get the vaccine then? My immune system seems doing great job defending me from all the mutations which already took place. So I don't want t…

> Plus the natural instinct to resist whenever pushed.

And there it is..you are still an adolescent who never fully matured emotionally. Glad we could get to the root of it.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#432

Post by mrtranscendence »

dvtrn wrote: post #131
mrtranscendence wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it was a week long, in a desirable location, and I could take my fiancee, I'd be all for it. But it's 1.5 days, no SOs, and held in a casino in the ass end of bumfuck Indiana. And forget about working -- it's centered around a team-building exercise with people from other parts of the company you probably don't know and will never talk to again.

I understand the “why” of team building, but the “what” or “how” the team-building is done often handled in such a hackneyed top-down way that I often wonder “if you just brought the team together, gave them options on ways to spend their time together, would they otherwise choose to do the same activities the managers designed for the event”? That’s more rhetorical than anything and is a roundabout way of saying: mo…

Yeah, some alternative scenario where we're given time to get to know folks at our own pace would be nicer. Like, here's some drinks, here are some board games, mingle, maybe talk about work, maybe not, make some connections. Instead we're under pressure to do some silly game that has only the faintest connection to anything the company does or stands for.

Maybe I'm just too bitter. Maybe if I stayed for the afterparty I'd get the kind of interaction I want. But late night carousing isn't my kind of thing generally.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#433

Post by Kihashi »

BoorishBears wrote: post #112
ugh123 wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought thats what Meetup was about, for both tech and non-tech communities. I haven't been involved for a while due to life changes (kids + relo), so not sure if its as vibrant in some cities as it used to be.

I literally never saw a Meetup group last for more than a year. The closest thing to an exception was a group that existed a decade then happened to get a Meetup for convenience, and they closed within a year of getting on (for unrelated reasons)

Most of the meetups I'm in have been going on for several years, at least.

My backpacking group is on meetup. I joined in 2016. Not sure when it was started, but it was a few years before that. Admittedly, the group existed in some form before Meetup did, but it has grown to over 2000 members on Meetup. There's a core group of about 50 or so who are very regularly active.

There's also a local hiking group, a python user group, a biking club, and a climbing club. Quite a few of these existed before meetup and will probably exist after meetup.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#434

Post by KronisLV »

alchemism wrote: post #257
KronisLV wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nor would you let them require that you spend an unpaid hour of your free time reading or doing professional development each week. Depending on how you look at things, this may or may not be necessary to be done on your own accord in your free time to avoid your skills getting dated and irrelevant. Essentially, you do have to keep up with at least some of the new developments within the industry to remain employab…

I do that reading and skill-training for unrelated tech things on the company’s dime, not mine. They are paying me highly to be a professional.

If your company pays for that, then that's cool!

Whereas with my workload and circumstances within the company, that's not realistic.

In the past 2 weeks, i've:

  - worked on migrating large enterprise apps from Java 8 to Java 11
  - worked on migrating those apps from Spring to Spring Boot
  - worked on containerizing them and carrying over configuration parameters
  - edited a whole lot of legacy code that was needed for all of that to happen and documented the process
  - helped people deal with external integrations and PKI related configuration and Ansible
  - helped onboard a person on the project and consulted other junior devs
  - got called in to work on a PHP project even though i'm technically a Java dev
  - consulted a person on how to use Figma to create designs for the app (even though i'll just have to develop it?)
  - realized that the app has literally no onboarding instructions or documentation whatsoever, so set out to create those
  - developed some scripts to seed the DB with test users and data, otherwise the app won't even allow logging in locally
  - consulted with the clients about all of these things, waiting for additional feedback on that
  - fixed a few bugs here and there, did the usual meetings, sprint estimation, architecture stuff etc.
As for how well i'm paid, i wouldn't necessarily use the word "highly": https://blog.kronis.dev/articles/on-finances-and-savings

Regardless, that probably shows that there is a world of difference in both compensation and the workloads of people. While having the time to learn new tech on company time would be good, it simply isn't my current reality, nor is it the reality for many out there. Thus, if i don't want to have my skills become obsolete, i spend the occasional morning/evening/weekend working on pet projects. That needs to be taken into account.

Curiously enough, i've heard some people voice the opinion that their workloads actually lessened in larger companies where they also happened to be more highly paid.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#435

Post by kdamken »

filmgirlcw wrote: post #98

The biggest problem with working from home, especially as it exists in the last 18 months, is that it ruins the entire work/life separation thing. For a long time, large companies like Google and Facebook bribed employees to basically live at work with an influx of perks. Free laundry. Nap rooms. Catered meals. The whole point is for you to never leave so you’ll work more. I think most of us can agree that is unhealt…

I find it interesting that people have this issue. Unless you’re actually on call, can’t you just snooze slack and emails until the next day?

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#436

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

4ggr0 wrote: post #389
LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you're blindly supporting what your government muppets are throwing at you in a simulation of competence you are a believer .

Everytime I hear or read what anti-vaxxers have to say, it feels like the person on the other end is a teenager who has watched The Matrix for the first time while having smoked a tad bit too much weed. "THEY control us and manipulate everything, bruh! You're just a sheeple."

Dude. Chill! I just like to be the black sheep. Besides that I took the red and the blue pill, seeing the one universal truth, which is is Lila spotted with Lalall.

Baa, baa, baa! (Blowing rings of purple haze at you)

edit: btw. (·) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#437

Post by lkrubner »

d3nj4l wrote: post #320
lkrubner wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've said this before on Hacker News, and now I wish to repeat, if you live in New York City, I host a once-a-month party, mostly for tech people. Very informal. You can get the vibe from the photos here: http://www.smashcompany.com/philosophy/everyone-was-amazing-... It's simply meant to give people a chance to meet other like minded people. Especially in this era of working-from-home it is too easy to end up feelin…

Just out of concern for your mobile, you should put a challenge for your phone number at least. There's a ton of scrapers out there that pick up phone numbers and automatically add you to spam call lists and the like. As for the invitation, unfortunately not in New York (or the States), but if I'm ever around I'd probably love to join.

My cell phone number hasn't changed since March of 2001 and I've had it listed on my personal weblog since April of 2001. I also list it in my Twitter bio:

https://twitter.com/krubner

In 20 years I've never had a problem.

If you ever visit NYC, please reach out.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#438

Post by randycupertino »

cableshaft wrote: post #411
null_shift wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i am also very interested to know this as well. the absence of “irl” community is something i have thought a lot about over the years. seems nowadays most people hang out with either: 1. existing friends/family 2. coworkers 3. go online with wfh, you lose #2. if you are a transplant, or never had #1, that doesn’t leave you with any options. it seems inevitable that the future of socialization will be online and niche…

Before the pandemic, I made a conscious effort to meet people by regularly attending a bunch of local meetups, over the course of two years. I made a ton of new acquaintances that way, and about 15 of those people ended up being part of my two main friend circles now. I always thought of myself as an introvert before, but I just kept attending these things, and being present a bunch, not being too irritating of a per…

Can you give me an example of the type of meetup you're attending? Will look for some in my area. Ty!

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#439

Post by marto1 »

To put it simply: No, working at an office is not intrinsically bad or evil, BUT everything around it is sufficiently broken to the point where people really don’t want to deal with it. This includes commutes, housing, healthcare in some(!) countries, proximity of schools, logistics when raising a family, car dependence, low balling from HR and many many others.

Re: Is going to the office a broken way of working?

#440

Post by benhurmarcel »

pimterry wrote: post #120
Ancalagon wrote: post #8

I’m gonna go against the HN grain here and, despite having been fully for remote work for the first year or so of the pandemic, come out and say that life has really gotten a lot more repetitive and frankly disappointing since covid and the death of the office. I kind of miss meeting people in the office. I was in the unfortunate position of having moved to a new city for a new tech job where I knew nobody just seven…

Coworking is a really great solution to this. You can have all the human contact and "it's 6pm - want to go for a beer?" easy socializing that you get from being in a busy office, but simultaneously keep almost all the flexibility and the lack-of-constraints of working from home (...almost - there's usually an expectation that you wear clothes). In many ways it's even better than office social contact: it decouples t…

It’s way too expensive for most people though.
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