Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

buzzfeednews.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 1001 posts

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#501

Post by psweber »

_bxg1 wrote: post #379
gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

The flipside is that it takes a lot more intentional effort, which many of us may struggle to put forth. The vast majority of friendships are made in incidental contexts: people you just happen to be around and interact with through the normal course of life. Many adults struggle to make and maintain friendships when they no longer have school forcing them to be around peers, and become very isolated. I think your in…

You're describing the status quo before the crisis. We weren't suffering from excess happiness and satisfaction. It's time for something new. The new things are yet to be determined.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#502

Post by anticensor »

tinyhouse wrote: post #57
amateurdev wrote: post #2

I have a feeling a lot of companies will follow suit. It saves up huge costs in real-estate by not having to provide seats to people. It also might just open up more companies to hire from any time zone.

Real-estate cost is not an issue for most companies. Also, all fully remote companies that I know have company "retreats" twice a year for all employees, which is expensive. It's not mandatory of course but very important. The bigger issue for me is what will happen to the US tech market. Why would Twitter hire people in the US if they can hire much cheaper people from Europa and other locations. The US government re…

> They might need to intervene with remote work as well.

Do you mean all boundary gateways should censor all information and knowledge, that are past without prior authorisation or a heavy tax, by default? Because that is how customs IRL work.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#504

Post by slimskim »

chrismarlow9 wrote: post #412

For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost my home. Does the company plan to let me live in the office if they let me go? Are we still doing Thanksgiving? What about a family tree, whos going to keep that up after I die? But seriously, after seeing some nasty employee outcomes over a few jobs it kind…

I think just as there are good salespeople and bad salespeople, we've got to do our part as job seekers to sniff the bad ones out. Some of those folks, rare albeit, genuinely mean to help. For me, a focus on company culture is super important but that comes with understanding that it's a business. And sometimes there will be tough business decisions that need to be made. I'd much rather work for a company who at least tries to foster good culture rather than one that completely ignores it.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#506

Post by distdev89 »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

Working from home has many advantages, but to paint this as an advantage is a disservice.

First, that's a nice way to respect your coworkers that they are a random set of people who work with you because of their Leetcode skills.

Having work relationships is much more than get a PR reviewed, or asking for feedback on documents. Working together, involves interactions that humanizes your fellow co-workers. Since, I've worked with people before, now that we have to remote collaborate I understand the social cues, people can come stand-offish or rude, in remote meetings, because video and voice calls can rarely bring out emotions.

We went from cracking a jokes at the beginning of a meeting and chit-chat while walking to meeting and walking back from meeting rooms to more formal remote meetings, since people are concerned that they won't be interpreted correctly over a call (the fear is rightly so given video calls are inherently bad at this)

There's no reason to detest your colleagues, they're people with priorities and one of them is work. There's going to be weeks where you'll be spending way longer than 8 hrs a day together and nights where you will need to call them in the because of an ongoing issue in production. To dehumanize these relationships would be a great loss.

If you want to build long lasting friendships, you can definitely do that at work. I know people who have made friends on same and different teams, through work related happy hours and hangout casually now (meeting people outside your team is severely crippled with the current remote work culture), heck people get married to people they meet at work.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#507

Post by ryanwaggoner »

papito wrote: post #467
chrismarlow9 wrote: post #412

For me too many companies use the "family" aspect of things too much. No, we're not a family. My family would let me sleep on their couch if I got fired or lost my home. Does the company plan to let me live in the office if they let me go? Are we still doing Thanksgiving? What about a family tree, whos going to keep that up after I die? But seriously, after seeing some nasty employee outcomes over a few jobs it kind…

"We are a family" is bullshit. You need to be a pretty egregious repeat offender to be ostracized from a real family. A company can fire you on a whim, simply because someone with a business degree sorted a spreadsheet with salaries in descending order, and you were in the top 20. The more correct analogy is a sports team. Everyone works well together to win the medal, but it's much more pragmatic in that sense. Perh…

You need to be a pretty egregious repeat offender to be ostracized from a real family

Or have a shitty family. A lot of “black sheep” out there are actually the relatively normal ones.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#508

Post by bigwavedave »

wan23 wrote: post #332
ashtonkem wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The utility of partial WFH is much, much lower than full WFH. With partial WFH I still have to live within reasonable commuting distance from the office, while if I’m full WFH I can leverage the difference in cost of living away from the office.

I would consider a much longer commute to be acceptable once or twice a week compared to having to do it every day. You could still have the benefit of having a lower cost of living without increasing the number of hours you spend commuting per week.

Absolutely. I have a 90 minute commute but I only have to do it one day out of five. For me, I couldn't be happier.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#509

Post by autokad »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

sleep takes 1/3 of our day, work takes 1/3 of our day. by your logic we have to fit all of our socializing plus everything else about our lives in that additional 1/3.

Re: Twitter Will Allow Employees to Work at Home Forever

#510

Post by ardy42 »

gregkerzhner wrote: post #356

I think if you work with a brilliant group of coworkers that you love to hangout out with, then you are lucky and I can see how you miss being in the office. But, thats not the case for many of us. The crux of work relationships is that they are not voluntary. You might get lucky and have ones you love, or you might get some that are distracting, or at worse, you dislike. Either way though you are stuck with them. I…

> I think people get stuck in the mental construct of "office = socializing" therefore "no office = antisocial". But thats not the case. If you could eliminate the 1 hour of wasted time daily on small talk and office distractions, as well as the 1 hour daily on commuting, that leaves you two extra hours a day of your life to focus on whatever you chose.

There's practical reasons for that. Socialization centered at school transitions easily to socialization centered at work. Also, probably for the worse, many people have few connections to communities independent of work/school. Creating those connections can be difficult, and many of the modern solutions to this problem are aren't very good (e.g. various relationship-shopping apps like "online dating").

Post reply on HN