601–610 of 632 posts
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> I think if commuting time was fully paid work hours, then companies would quickly agree that minor optimizations like this aren't worth it. I would argue that you have priced in your commute to your market value when you take a job that requires you to commute, especially since knowledge workers tend to be salary, not hourly.
Well then you could consider remote jobs to be worth £2k+ more salary, net.
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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…
What a hostile reply to someone who merely stated to be thankful to work in the same city as their colleagues. If anything to me it feels like you are normalizing your personal experience and implicitly trying to force others to comply to your interaction style.
Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and wil…
> Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? I've worked in software for > 20 years. I've been a tech lead of a few projects that shipped and YOU likely use in your daily everyday life. Outside of interviews, i've had to use a real-life whiteboard ... twice ...
That's neat! I hope you don't think your anecdotal evidence discredits my own anecdotal evidence about how useful they are. People use different tools and I'm guessing you're not intending to say folks that have been productively using whiteboards for decades are somehow wrong.
I should preface my comment by saying that I generally agree that full WFH is a very reasonable request, but I can only partly follow their reasoning on the diversity factor: > "... will change the makeup of our workforce [to] younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied" Was this an issue before COVID? I can see how this policy might help shape the workforce, but not how it would chan…
> I also understand their justification for how these might limit candidates except "whiter" and "neuro-normative", which their letter didn't seem to provide direct reasoning for. I suppose "whiter" might be the result of drawing more from the local population, but again they seem to be arguing that a policy that's still more flexible than pre-COVID will make things worse, which I don't follow.
I suspect race, gender, and height biases are a big deal and substantially mitigated by various kinds of remote work, but I don't have much more to add about these things.
About "neuro-normative," I have ADHD. Open plan offices, while they are a blight upon the productivity of every worker, are substantially worse for me than for other people. Apple literally prevents teams from communicating with other teams. The combination of open plan offices, secrecy, and demands to come to the office and listen to salespeople on calls all day but not discuss your work with more than a few other people is truly mind-blowing.
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Fair point for some people. Something I don’t see on HN is how the ideal wfh works for people who can’t afford a study. What if you live with your parents and share with a sibling? This might not be the case for established six figure programmers in the states. But there are lots of people with less money who might value having a separate space to work. Might even be the silent majority outside of highly paid develop…
I'll just throw out there when I started developing all I had was one crappy laptop and headphones and the way I ended up working was by going to the Starbucks down the street getting a hot chocolate and a scone and going to town for hours at a time. Of course that wouldn't work as well for meetings but it was simpler times back then. Although now I've got an idea to make coffee shops produce more revenue I'm realizi…
Honestly, at least Apple laid out their intentions. People can leave or stay, but the policy is clear. At my workplace they keep nodding at "hybrid" without any specifics and the resulting fear due to uncertainty is far worse than a clear policy that some (many) people might not like...
If your hybrid is mandatory then you can expect to be back to full time 5 days in a years time approx.
Nobody is going to pay Bay Area salaries so you can live in the woods of Idaho or whatever.
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As a manager, these types of comments and sentiments are so incredibly frustrating for me. This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions. Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all , not the least of which because we don't want…
When the recession hits, yanking hybrid away and demanding full time is an easy way to both A) easily cut staff that cant show up to the office easily (so preselected layoffs) and B) have massive leverage to force the issue sense they cant just go quit to make 20k more now in response
I used to work with them a lot in a past role, and the remote guys seemed to get disappeared much more quickly than the folks who had a home base.
When your boss is in Brazil or whatever and gets a savings target, he sorts a spreadsheet by salary and utilization and poof!
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If your hybrid is mandatory then you can expect to be back to full time 5 days in a years time approx.
As a manager, these types of comments and sentiments are so incredibly frustrating for me. This is pure supposition based on no evidence. It's entirely a byproduct of a lack of trust in management intentions. Taking my company as an example, while the executive team has been ambiguous, I know that a full return to 5 days of asses in seats is not being contemplated at all , not the least of which because we don't want…
Can anyone honestly and sincerely tell me that online whiteboards are exactly equivalent to in-person whiteboard sessions? There is no value in having lunches together with your colleagues? There is no value in body-language when communicating? I'm all for fully WFH policies, but I think it's a bit naive or dishonest to say that it's exactly the same work experience. I've been working remote for over a decade and wil…
Before my time, the company did some kind of retreat of 2 days, with sleeping in,for all 40 of the IT staff. The idea was to get them to know each other,as they where dispatched to 20+ divisions and only spoke by phone. There was no work to be done there, no cringy corporate stuff, just a mountain of food and drinks. It must have been expensive. We're now 20 years later, and they're still referring to it. But when an…
Not saying the retreat was a wholesale bad idea, but it sounds to me like part of the reason it's political could be because there's an in-group and out-group derived from the retreat.
Unfortunately the folks that get to make these decisions are so removed from the reality of their company's every day tasks that all they can think is "if I don't see butts in the seats I bought, then obviously no work is getting done".
The problem is, for many people and jobs that heuristic is accurate. I’ve heard of countless examples of people spending their time gaming at home instead of working. Humans need extrinsic motivation. Outside of overheated labour markets, this is going to be a real problem. Expect intrusive monitoring to become widespread if wfh persists.
I think competent organizations will actually do the counter and embrace trusting their employees. IME, it is basically already impossible not to -- there's just way too much work and complexity for someone to accurately know exactly what all of their reports are doing.