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80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

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Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#581

Post by skirmish »

sdiupIGPWEfh wrote: post #414
itishappy wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely agree! I work way harder unsupervised. It's probably also naïve to believe all humans respond to supervision the same way...

Unsupervised and left to my own devices, I tend to spend my time on what I actually think is the most valuable contribution I can make. Selfishly, perhaps, because that tends to lead me toward what I find to be the most fulfilling and enjoyable work. This tends to upset some people, because my maximum effort is not funneled toward advancing their immediate metrics. But others get it.

In my experience, just doing work you are told to do is the surest path to burnout (at least for me). If I am allowed to pick an area I concentrate on, I remain engaged and excited about the project and spend more hours per week on it. From manager's POV is that so bad?

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#582

Post by skirmish »

MBCook wrote: post #174
spamizbad wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most office workers really aren't supervised unless you count a manager glancing across the open-plan office to see how many butts are in seats.

Which is also where you get pointless busywork. Doing things on your computer to pretend to look productive because if you were to just sit and think or take a five minute break a micromanager would yell at you or nosy teammate would rat you out as “unproductive“. Even if you’re thinking through a heart problem or just finished something mentally draining from complexity.

If I am ever forced into office, I will look very productive as I update my resume, schedule interviews and spend hours on https://leetcode.com/ every day! The butts-in-seats managers will probably want to promote me by the time I hand in my two weeks notice.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#583

Post by wizofaus »

starttoaster wrote: post #578
wizofaus wrote: post #548

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a definition of "team" I've never heard before - "people working on unrelated things".

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing. Equally common in operations roles fo…

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#584

Post by skirmish »

flangola7 wrote: post #148
mkl95 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lots of employers like to delude themselves that their company is some big important, cutting-edge enterprise that's making a real impact in the world. Pretty much. The only time I've considered going back to in-person work since the pandemic was for a FAANG. If you think your employees want to go back to the office, you are either a big tech company or you are deluded

Realistically most FAANG employees are not doing anything that will be written down in history either. For example, whichever division at Microsoft is responsible for Teams.

It's a common joke at Google: thousands of PhDs moving fields from one protobuf into another. Can confirm, did some of that personally before transferring into a more interesting area.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#585

Post by starttoaster »

wizofaus wrote: post #583
starttoaster wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing. Equally common in operations roles fo…

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Because it is a team. And, exactly, now tell that to our managers.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#586

Post by bagacrap »

closeparen wrote: post #579
bagacrap wrote: post #573

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously no one would rather pay 4x as much for the same thing. In that sense no one chooses the price of their house as they'd clearly pay $1 if they could. But yes, you choose to pay a lot to live near work (you value your time), in a place with great weather and public schools and natural beauty (since we seem to be talking Bay Area here). The $300k house in BFE Ohio does not have these properties. At one point i…

We have agency in that we could choose to renounce careers in tech. That’s it. There is a price/quality tradeoff in every housing market; all complaints about price can be interpreted as insufficient willingness to compromise on quality. A cardboard box under a bridge is free! “You’re actually obscenely wealthy because you don’t live in a basement and drive 6 hours to work” is not the argument you think it is. Tech w…

You can easily find big tech jobs in Seattle, Austin, NY, Denver, Los Angeles, etc etc.

Actions speak louder than words, so no, they are not telling me they want to live elsewhere. They're telling me they like to complain.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#587

Post by pcthrowaway »

skirmish wrote: post #529
xedrac wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's more like a 52 hour work week for me. I think it depends on your personality. I have a hard time stopping my work, but I still think the benefits outweigh that.

I had this problem and solved it by tracking time spent in a spreadsheet. I have time targets for work and personal projects per week. If they are above, next week I switch some time e.g. from work to personal projects. I found this greatly reduces risk of burnout for me.

Why not just use a time tracking app like Toggl instead of a spreadsheet?

I guess the spreadsheet isn't so bad if you work in long, 2-4+ hour chunks. I often work in 30-minute bursts so just being able to click the start and stop buttons in my browser is less tedious than entering the time manually

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#588

Post by gardenhedge »

wizofaus wrote: post #583
starttoaster wrote: post #578

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty common in “DevOps” teams, in my experience. Some people are working on some autoscaling CI runner server initiative, some are working on writing code, some are fixing issues in CI pipelines, some are hardening the security of kubernetes clusters, etc. Their goals are completely unrelated to the others but is all work that falls under their team’s umbrella, and needs doing. Equally common in operations roles fo…

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Exactly. I work in a team that has multiple products so different team member can be working on different products, different priorities, different deadlines and for different stakeholders.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#589

Post by wizofaus »

gardenhedge wrote: post #588
wizofaus wrote: post #583

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why even call it a team then, and what would be the point of stand-ups for such a group?

Exactly. I work in a team that has multiple products so different team member can be working on different products, different priorities, different deadlines and for different stakeholders.

Sure, my own team work on multiple products, but it's all the same codebase and all of us share the work for all products between ourselves. There is another team in the company that works on an entirely separate product with a very different codebase (different tech stack entirely) and upper management seem to have this idea we would work better as one big "team" - thankfully so far we've managed to persuade them it would make little sense. I'd probably be looking for alternative job options if we had to do daily stand-ups with that many other coworkers, half of whom I'd never have reason to engage in actual teamwork with.

Re: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

#590

Post by heavyset_go »

everdrive wrote: post #340
deaddodo wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Open offices are the literal reason (after commuting/traffic) that I no longer want to go into the office. My work doesn't require a ton of person:person engagement and it's much easier for me to just zone out in my own headspace to do it. When I was required in the office, I would just wear headphones to avoid distractions, but I would have to deal with 2-3hrs of driving/day on top of it. This meant that my employer…

I remember the first time I was in an open office. I was flabbergasted. We'd all get on a call so we could talk to some remote vendor. Other people would have their mics on, so I'd hear my own voice repeated and delayed through the Zoom call. I could barely talk, and barely hear anyone. It was a self-evidently terrible decision that everyone was just going along with. Sometime later we were moved to a different open…

This is both hilarious and terrifying at the same time. Thanks for being a hero.
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