561–570 of 632 posts
Two years later, I onboarded many people on my team, figured out productive ways to collaborate remotely and developed very much real friendships with people I have never been in the same room with.
It takes effort to ensure people have a forum to ask questions, mentor people or just hang out online. But it's not impossible.
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My story is the same as yours, but I don't think online communications (especially "structured", formal, work ones, like a daily standup over Zoom) capture everything that spontaneous "hallway" conversations do, including with people not on even on your team who you'd never talk to otherwise. I wish it were same, but, even as someone who grew up with more online relationships than meatspace ones, I'd be lying if I sa…
The hallway conversation thing befuddles me. Have you ever opened a chat window with someone at work to speak to them on the side? That's a hallway conversation. You can tell them any secret you want there. Have you ever seen two people interact in a group chat and learn something you didn't know before? That's the same as overhearing a hallway conversation. Grabbed a few friends in a group chat to chat about the wee…
Well, secret in the sense of fully accessible to everyone in management at your company.
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When someone says "anyone can do it" I understand that to mean what they said, which is that they believe anyone can do it.
Someone has clarified it twice yet you're still fighting the word "anyone" instead of trying to view it through a reasonable lens. If his point only makes sense because he excluded a very rare group of people, then your point only makes sense because you include a very rare group of people. Have some grace, be excellent to each other.
I have some grace; I'm willing to include those in my consideration that they have deemed unworthy of consideration.
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> never Leadership changes. People change their minds. Something can absolutely be a genuine intent today but that could change in a few years.
First, if Apple declared, right now, that full remote was an option, what you say is still true . i.e., in two years, management could decide to take away that benefit. So I don't see how that kind of reasoning is useful when making an employment decision today . Getting up in arms about a purported future two years from now is just not rational, and is ultimately a byproduct of fear. More broadly, this has always be…
If that were true, we'd all have private offices, or at least the option, instead of open plan office space.
An important point that’s missed is that working in an office is dramatically worse now than it was when I started my career in the late 90’s. I had my own office as intern. When I needed focus time (which is a lot of time as a developer), I could close a door. Especially with Apple’s open-concept HQ, the delta between WFH and office is larger than it has to be. The market is speaking. Apple pays well below the rest…
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Could be. I know a lot of the older people in my not-game-development field won't join work functions organized in online chats. You have to call them, or send them an email. Out of curiosity, I hear a lot of negative things about working in game development. How do you like it?
Game development is full of exploitative companies looking to squeeze whatever effort they can from passionate young people. When you're young and inexperienced it's best to avoid those companies as best you can; the experience you'll gain will be less desirable than at a company that treats you well and presents you with opportunities for long term growth. That said, as an older programmer I would not expect to ever…
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You know the answer to this is "ok boomer" right? But seriously you hit upon a lot of topics us older folks seem to get and younger folks don't and also vice versa. It's also well within their rights to demand remote work and not have to go into the office at all. Perhaps younger minds are better at collaboration than older minds? And even as an older guy who had a "butts in seats" policy when I managed folks, I don'…
I just think it's unfortunate that he's dragged culture war contempt into the discussion, as i think that has inhibited our ability to have curious conversation about the tradeoffs.
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> Again, of course not; but if a company is going to expect or require people to do it, it should foot the bill for the inconveniences caused. Sorry if I wasn't clear - these lunches have nothing to do with work. I eat lunch sometimes, my colleagues eat lunch sometimes. Sometimes we go out to eat together and socialize. Work doesn't enter into the equation. We lose that benefit when going fully remote. There is value…
My friends are not my coworkers and my coworkers are not my friends, nor do very many of my coworkers become my friends. It's a job, not a lifestyle. I'll do team and business lunches and hang outs, and they can be fun, but they are nothing but a distraction from what I'm trying to do. My manager worked entirely remote for our company since it's inception, literally in a separate time zone. I never met him, I don't e…
> CEO Tim Cook called in-person collaboration benefits "irreplaceable" and in an email, the executive team talked about the importance of "the serendipity that comes from bumping into colleagues" during in-person work. Another extroverted MBA who doesn't understand why many engineers need big, unbroken chunks of silence & concentration to do great work.
Lots of companies' executive officers are relaying identical messages, even down to the same choice of words. "Serendipity." "Collaboration." "Magical hallway conversations." I've never seen all of Corporate America, including fierce competitors, so closely aligned on a very particular narrative, as I've seen them aligned on returning to physical offices. It's as if they all received the exact same memo with the same…
But enough about the Wall Street Journal