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Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

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Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#81

Post by xlii »

bboygravity wrote: post #69
padolsey wrote: post #47

I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers…

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices. What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home". That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would hav…

That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average).

The „on average” is key however. I’d say that most of the people don’t understand the cost of remote work until it hits them and simply not all can bear that cost.

It’s not like people are unwilling (occasionally you can find slackers) but it’s more often things like issues caused by functioning without micromanagement (which is the case in many companies), problem with written communication skills, communication process not efficient for remote work (e.g. water cooler knowledge share which is foundational for people breaks without water cooler) etc.

Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished by home conflicts, non-prepped environment or depression coming from isolation and lack of physical movement. Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)

From my experience, both remote work proponents and opponents are right with their arguments but the crowd cannot be generalized. Some will suck at the desk, some will suck in remote.

As for „sit where I can see you” - that’s a standard offshoring practice, nothing new. You do get to the point of „who watches the watchers” conundrum sooner or later ;)

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#82

Post by freehorse »

huijzer wrote: post #27
jama211 wrote: post #26

Isn’t it just smarter to clear your actual build folder and then rebuild it with a script? Bonus points if you limit resources to it so it takes ages? That way if they ever actually look closely, they’ll see it’s the REAL work you’re supposed to be doing that’s building, and you’ll never get in trouble

If I was a boss and saw someone being busy building Rust all day I would offer a faster computer.

Is this the way to get your boss buy you a faster computer?

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#84

Post by kdmtctl »

wruza wrote: post #36
hakaneskici wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creative use case for a TSR :) The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :) When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.

Some mouse drivers used an upper ascii range (less used) and rendered 4 “arrow” cursor parts into it over 4 chars over which the cursor ought to be. And then replaced those 4 chars on screen temporarily. As a result you had a fully pixel-perfect cursor in text mode.

Norton Utils had it. Mind blowing for its time.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#85

Post by iammrpayments »

dijit wrote: post #78

Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal. Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either. However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was…

Red means good in a lot of Asian countries, I bought my macbook there and the stock market shows red when it goes up.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#86

Post by dijit »

iammrpayments wrote: post #85
dijit wrote: post #78

Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal. Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either. However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was…

Red means good in a lot of Asian countries, I bought my macbook there and the stock market shows red when it goes up.

yeah, I’m aware, which is why i was careful to say “our” culture, like- predominantly english speaking countries.

it is interesting how this difference can exist though.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#87

Post by _cenw »

xlii wrote: post #81
bboygravity wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices. What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home". That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would hav…

That’s an unpopular opinion but given more than a decade of remote work experience I’d say: yes, people are less efficient in remote environment (on average). The „on average” is key however. I’d say that most of the people don’t understand the cost of remote work until it hits them and simply not all can bear that cost. It’s not like people are unwilling (occasionally you can find slackers) but it’s more often thing…

I still miss that one team that did async work extremely well. On my current team - fully remote, but siloed knowledge due to lack of capacity - there's a high chance that things go missing in dailies.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#88

Post by dwedge »

bboygravity wrote: post #69
padolsey wrote: post #47

I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers…

I can't help but think that there must be some arbitrage opportunity there: massive companies hire top notch engineers and all make them waste their time in (commute to/from) offices. What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home". That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would hav…

I think that despite what LinkedIn influencers promote, a lot of people take advantage of wfh to be less focused on work. Not all, maybe not even most, but dealing with this (and not knowing who will fit into which camp) eats into the efficiency saving.

Also once the majority of a team is WFH, it's very tempting for management to take this one step further and start supplementing, then replacing, with off shore workers

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#89

Post by pasc1878 »

dijit wrote: post #78

Never underestimate the power of colour on a terminal. Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either. However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was…

Even worse - My part of project just did a release of new functionality making things much quicker. Others just did a change of the screen colours making no difference and got massive praise for their work.

Re: Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by

#90

Post by varispeed »

padolsey wrote: post #47

I remember working for a small agency in London with a bit of a top-heavy management structure. Many times would my shoulder be subtly gazed over to "check on progress". I ended up using IRSSI to chat with friends, wgets to read my fav blogs, and my twitter stream pouring into what looked like an excel spreadsheet UI . I always got my work done in the first couple hours of the day. I will always resent those managers…

Most of the programming I do outside of computer. I like to think everything through in my head before I type something in. I see no value in putting something that maybe works maybe not and then fiddling with it. That would slow me down too much. That said I also have ADHD so I can't stare at IDE whole day. One time a junior developer complained about me to the manager, that I spend most time on Reddit or outside of office (some best work I created whilst walking in the park). Manager called me in and said there are complaints from team members that apparently I am "slacking". I asked him if I deliver on time and whether there were any complaints about my output. He said no. I was back to my desk. I had no further complaints. Though that manager and that developer were sacked couple of weeks later for poor performance.
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