I'll preface this by saying I am extremely lucky to be in the position I'm in. I realize that a lot of jobs can't be done remotely. And they are often the toughest, hardest jobs. I'm also lucky...
I'll preface this by saying I am extremely lucky to be in the position I'm in. I realize that a lot of jobs can't be done remotely. And they are often the toughest, hardest jobs. I'm also lucky that my boss has the exact opposite feelings of the bosses described in the article. He is 100% on board with us being remote.
I work in video and television production, so almost all of my job can be done remotely. I work from home most of the time and occasionally go to events to film or live broadcasts to do on site switching. But if I'm just editing, why should I be in an office when I'm mostly working solo on a project? I don't need to be around others to edit video. I'm actually more efficient because I'm not distracted by people outside of my door talking or any of the million other distractions that happen in an office.
There are a few other people in my department and we have a weekly Zoom meeting where we discuss any upcoming events/projects and give one another a heads up on anything we might need assistance/collaboration on.
I'm also extremely lucky that everyone in my department is very self sufficient. We all know what are jobs are and don't need much direction. I think having that ability to self-direct is crucial if you're working from home. There are times when I don't talk to my boss for a week or two beyond an email saying, "Here's a new project." My boss knows he can trust us to get work done and manage ourselves.
As for downsides...I'm the "new guy" and I've been there five years. Everyone else has been there for ten or more years. I think that makes a big difference. I can see how onboarding a new person would be more difficult remotely. Especially when it comes to figuring out the group culture of a workplace.
Be rude once and it stops. Had this happen when I was in an office with a similar headphones=leave me alone rule. They stood there, I tapped my headphones, shook my head, and waved them off. They...
But there were always these wallys you could see, bounding up the central isles, miming gestures of the removal of headphones whilst then standing right in your monitor-screen eyeline and grinning inanely.
Be rude once and it stops.
Had this happen when I was in an office with a similar headphones=leave me alone rule. They stood there, I tapped my headphones, shook my head, and waved them off. They didn't leave. Slowly paused my music, took off my headphones, held up my finger to stop them talking while I took a drink of water, then asked curtly "What?'
It was a pointless interruption, I told them frankly to not disturb me again and send an email or IM if they needed to discuss something like that, and put my headphones back on while they were still talking. It stopped.
Not a problem now as I'm long out of that office and offices at all. My worst coworker annoyance now is a programmer that doesn't just outright ask a question he has, but always starts with "hey" via Teams and waits for a response before asking.
God I hate these people. I had my status on slack as an emoji of a crossed out waiving hand and said "If you only say Hey I'm ignoring you" for months until my district manager asked me to change...
My worst coworker annoyance now is a programmer that doesn't just outright ask a question he has, but always starts with "hey" via Teams and waits for a response before asking.
God I hate these people. I had my status on slack as an emoji of a crossed out waiving hand and said "If you only say Hey I'm ignoring you" for months until my district manager asked me to change it. Our IT contractors still start every interaction with just a "hey" and I just ignore them unless I know why they are reaching out and I'll just jump into answering their unasked question.
Oh god, this kills me too. Some of my colleagues will IM me on teams with "Hello bonedriven" and expect a response - which despite never receiving does not seem to disabuse them of the habit.
Oh god, this kills me too. Some of my colleagues will IM me on teams with "Hello bonedriven" and expect a response - which despite never receiving does not seem to disabuse them of the habit.
I'm lucky in that it's my own manager who has a message with that link as his status. I appreciate his doing so and basically setting that expectation team-wide so that I don't have to seem rude...
I'm lucky in that it's my own manager who has a message with that link as his status. I appreciate his doing so and basically setting that expectation team-wide so that I don't have to seem rude about it.
You could replace the "What?" with a very mature and sophisticated version of "please leave me alone during work regarding unrelated matters" and the point still stands. Office chatterboxes do not...
You could replace the "What?" with a very mature and sophisticated version of "please leave me alone during work regarding unrelated matters" and the point still stands. Office chatterboxes do not care about you. They want something to talk at. You have to dislodge the notion that you are a comfortable place to feed their habit.
They are not "office chatterboxes;" they are human beings. You should treat people with respect, especially if their crime is talking to you. You're dehumanizing them and rationalizing poor...
They are not "office chatterboxes;" they are human beings. You should treat people with respect, especially if their crime is talking to you. You're dehumanizing them and rationalizing poor treatment by generalizing that they don't care about you.
their crime is talking at me, not too me. They aren't giving due respect to my time or attention, you make it sound like I consider them animals And they're due respect, but not at the expense of...
their crime is talking at me, not too me. They aren't giving due respect to my time or attention, you make it sound like I consider them animals
And they're due respect, but not at the expense of my own well being, I can only be one sidedly generous for so long. I'm referring to repeated behavior, missing polite social cues that I don't appreciate the way they're treating me, and the need to be explicit.
Respect is earned, not given. If you don't respect my time even with ample amounts of clues, I you haven't earned a respectful answer. You'll get an annoyed "What?!" PG's Maker vs Manager schedule...
Respect is earned, not given.
If you don't respect my time even with ample amounts of clues, I you haven't earned a respectful answer. You'll get an annoyed "What?!"
I agree; respect is earned. But I believe it's earned by the fact that they're a human being. They don't need to conform to whatever expectations you're placing on their interactions for you to...
I agree; respect is earned. But I believe it's earned by the fact that they're a human being. They don't need to conform to whatever expectations you're placing on their interactions for you to treat them without contempt.
Again, to reiterate: they treat me with contempt by not respecting my need to focus. Why should I be the one that's being courteous just because I'm the quiet one in the interaction?
Again, to reiterate: they treat me with contempt by not respecting my need to focus.
Why should I be the one that's being courteous just because I'm the quiet one in the interaction?
As much as I hate those kinds of interactions, the poster talking about general human respect has a point. How about we reframe the situation a little to understand it better. What would your...
As much as I hate those kinds of interactions, the poster talking about general human respect has a point. How about we reframe the situation a little to understand it better. What would your reaction be if your partner or child did the same thing. Would you also react with the same level of disrespect? Maybe what they want to discuss is important to them, but trivial and unimportant to you. Maybe someone prompted them, directly or indirectly, to interrupt you. At the end of the day, we are all humans and extending some level of tolerance for actions we dislike it what makes coexistence possible.
I am willing to use Hanlon's Razor for the first few interruptions for every person. But what if it keeps happening for weeks and months, no matter how directly I communicate my need for complete...
I am willing to use Hanlon's Razor for the first few interruptions for every person. But what if it keeps happening for weeks and months, no matter how directly I communicate my need for complete focus?
At which point can I stop being respectful and start assuming malice instead of stupidity?
It's especially frustrating with a brain like mine which cannot handle rapidly switching between tasks. I can be in an incredibly productive groove and if I'm interrupted by something unimportant...
It's especially frustrating with a brain like mine which cannot handle rapidly switching between tasks. I can be in an incredibly productive groove and if I'm interrupted by something unimportant but requires more than a modicum of thought then my momentum is gone. You may have only taken five minutes of my time but you easily wasted an hour of my productivity.
Yep that happened to me. I snapped and firmly expressed my desire to be left alone during work hours re: inane bullshit conversations, especially if I'm busy. And then had a meeting with my boss...
Yep that happened to me. I snapped and firmly expressed my desire to be left alone during work hours re: inane bullshit conversations, especially if I'm busy.
And then had a meeting with my boss about being a team player and workplace temperament. Coworker never bothered me again though.
Not really. Most people are, for lack of a better word, non-confrontational. They don't like the idea of risking pissing someone off. The "not a team player" thing would hold weight if it was...
Not really. Most people are, for lack of a better word, cowardsnon-confrontational. They don't like the idea of risking pissing someone off.
The "not a team player" thing would hold weight if it was something important and job related, to which you wouldn't respond with "Don't bother me again." and requires the person wasting time to have reported it which also goes against their non-confrontational ways. If they do, you tell the higher up bringing it up that they interrupted your time critical, high dollar work to talk about "inappropriate-in-a-workplace" topics leaving the subject open to interpretation.
You are magically no longer bothered by the time waster and the time waster stops being a little tattletale when someone tells them to stop wasting time.
I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to work, when my work suffers because of the wasting of time by others and upper management elects to not resolve it or I am reprimanded for it, then that's on their ass and I make sure it's known to be their fault. It doesn't require clout or seniority, just requires that you be good at your job, as your managers are just as spineless as the rest of them, don't like being told the facts of the matter either, and ultimately someone up the chain will agree that wasting my time is a more serious offense than someone getting their feelings hurt. Add to the fact that your manager's manager's manager is going to get real ticked about your manager and manager's manager wasting their time with a meeting about me telling someone to stop wasting mine.
Everybody's got a boss, when the CEO says it's okay for people to waste time on the clock, I'll stop telling people to stop wasting mine.
We have an informal expectation at my workplace that folks can advertise that they follow "nohello", which basically means that if you message them, all details need to be in the initial message....
We have an informal expectation at my workplace that folks can advertise that they follow "nohello", which basically means that if you message them, all details need to be in the initial message. It prevents this sort of needless wait for the core of the communication.
I’m lucky enough to work in a building that doesn’t really have many cubicles. Almost everyone has their own office. So I could always just close the door if I didn’t want to be too distracted....
I’m lucky enough to work in a building that doesn’t really have many cubicles. Almost everyone has their own office. So I could always just close the door if I didn’t want to be too distracted.
I recently started a 100% remote (programming) job and, yes, the onboarding probably took a little longer. The company is really good about it: I've offered to go to the office for a while if it...
I recently started a 100% remote (programming) job and, yes, the onboarding probably took a little longer. The company is really good about it: I've offered to go to the office for a while if it would be helpful, but they are happy with the way things are. (Me too; it's about four hours away, so I would have to get a hotel).
Anyway, I definitely work harder, longer, and more diligently from home than I ever did from an office.
Bull pens work only if you have a team of people who work on the same thing and they benefit from the ability to just look over and chat with others. It does NOT work if you have multiple bull...
Bull pens work only if you have a team of people who work on the same thing and they benefit from the ability to just look over and chat with others.
It does NOT work if you have multiple bull pens with unrelated teams with no visual or auditory blocks in the way. A.k.a open plan office.
It doesn't even work then because sometimes you need to work without distractions or feeling like people are constantly looking over your shoulder. Build dedicated collaboration spaces for when...
Bull pens work only if you have a team of people who work on the same thing and they benefit from the ability to just look over and chat with others.
It doesn't even work then because sometimes you need to work without distractions or feeling like people are constantly looking over your shoulder.
Build dedicated collaboration spaces for when people need to work together, but let them have private spaces for when they need to be heads down.
If you need to worry about people looking over your shoulder, either your team's seating arrangement or composition needs some work. I'm not talking about a "team" that's 20 people, I'm talking...
If you need to worry about people looking over your shoulder, either your team's seating arrangement or composition needs some work.
I'm not talking about a "team" that's 20 people, I'm talking about the "backend developer team" that's like 3 people and a trainee in a small room with a whiteboard or two.
They should do that anyway, but I wonder why some more established companies don’t build a campus in a smaller community with lower housing prices that wants to grow.
They should do that anyway, but I wonder why some more established companies don’t build a campus in a smaller community with lower housing prices that wants to grow.
preexisting office space is cheaper, surely. But when it comes to constructing new downtown offices vs creating flatter campuses or office parks in smaller communities, it's probably an ego thing...
preexisting office space is cheaper, surely.
But when it comes to constructing new downtown offices vs creating flatter campuses or office parks in smaller communities, it's probably an ego thing with management. They can afford to live close and like the status of working and living near downtown. You move the office into the country where the pions work, and suddenly that luxury bayside apartment doesn't mean much.
I feel like the general public is failing to consider long term side effects of racing into the telework singularity. Breaking down the barriers to place accelerates globalization of the workforce...
I feel like the general public is failing to consider long term side effects of racing into the telework singularity. Breaking down the barriers to place accelerates globalization of the workforce and when followed as a trend, will likely expose domestic workers to competition from cheaper, off shore labor.
As a local, part of your value proposition is that you’re close enough to the center of gravity to be responsive, anticipative, and worth investing in. This race to abstract workers into digital feeds, I fear, will have deleterious side effects that we don’t yet fully understand.
This is solidly something in the downside column, and a phenomenon that I've had a front row seat to. My current company transitioned to fully-remote once the pandemic started, and things were...
This is solidly something in the downside column, and a phenomenon that I've had a front row seat to.
My current company transitioned to fully-remote once the pandemic started, and things were whirring along fairly well. We had augmented our domestic engineering teams with a few global contractors mainly because domestic talent was incredibly hard to recruit. Then when the economy started taking a dump, we had some significant layoffs who were almost exclusively domestic-based. We've since hired on developers exclusively from Eastern Europe, all on a contract basis, and now over half the team is based out of there.
Meanwhile, our leadership is writing thought pieces about how companies need to offer greater benefits for US workers, and focus on improving gender and racial diversity, while they're hiring almost exclusively white dudes from Belarus who have no benefits. And we're a "mission-driven" company.
Yes, there is plenty of that already, but I think geopolitics, legal differences, and cultural differences will continue to make borders important? This is true even in manufacturing. Toyota...
Yes, there is plenty of that already, but I think geopolitics, legal differences, and cultural differences will continue to make borders important?
This is true even in manufacturing. Toyota builds cars in the US for good reasons. TSMC is building a chip plant in Arizona. Globalization overshot a bit. Where you do things still matters.
Meanwhile legal differences mean that many European companies strongly prefer to use a data center in Europe, so the data center companies have adjusted. There's no physical reason for this, but culture matters.
The world is an uncontrolled experiment and predictions are difficult, but I expect there will be a mix of organizations where some almost entirely rely on remote work and others prefer to work in the same place. I don't think either one has such a decisive advantage that it wins over the other in most situations.
Of course. Nobody is in a hurry to make coal miners into a digital workforce. My point is that there is an ongoing shakeup in the generation and distribution of value in the white collar labor...
Of course. Nobody is in a hurry to make coal miners into a digital workforce. My point is that there is an ongoing shakeup in the generation and distribution of value in the white collar labor market, reinforced by mounting social pressure on companies to go remote against their better judgement.
We’ve broken the seal on the domain of white collar work that generations of young professionals aspire to, and exposed its innards to the global markets. With history as a guide, there will certainly be tax structures, laws, regulations, and protectionist practices in an effort to curb this trend, but I don’t trust that when the dust settles we’re going to like where this has taken us.
I’ve always worried about having to compete against everyone in the entire country instead of just everyone in the local area. I have to remind myself that while it’s far more competitive for me,...
I’ve always worried about having to compete against everyone in the entire country instead of just everyone in the local area. I have to remind myself that while it’s far more competitive for me, it also means I have the potential to apply to any position in the entire country, and employers have to offer more competitive packages.
Exactly. Bay Area company no longer bound to paying Bay Area wages. But employer in Kansas can't get away with paying average Kansas wages either. It extends globlly, which only becomes a major...
Exactly. Bay Area company no longer bound to paying Bay Area wages. But employer in Kansas can't get away with paying average Kansas wages either.
It extends globlly, which only becomes a major problem if outside factors (like hard limits on migration) prevent the workforce from being as mobile as the jobs.
It'll go the same as outsourcing your IT: a massive outsourcing boom, then a hard reigning in because it actually sort of sucked from day one, and then back to internal teams. I'm not too worried...
It'll go the same as outsourcing your IT: a massive outsourcing boom, then a hard reigning in because it actually sort of sucked from day one, and then back to internal teams.
I'm not too worried about this one. It almost always ends up being lower quality.
I mean, one of the big reccuring problems that results in the waxing and waning of global recruiting is language and culture barriers and timezone differences. Having people on your team that...
I mean, one of the big reccuring problems that results in the waxing and waning of global recruiting is language and culture barriers and timezone differences.
Having people on your team that speak the native language of the customer base is helpful. This can also be used for positive building of globalization...let the India team focus on India market, rather than relying on them to do all the work for all the markets.
If there's one thing bosses dislike more than not having people in offices, it's having them across multiple timezones making meetings impossible.
On the flip side, globalizing more of the workforce will, in theory, help equalize inequality a bit. Wages for $250k devlopers go down, but 5 people get lifted out of poverty...that kind of thing.
Having a global presence means covering on-call rotations is easier...fewer 3 AM wakeups if the workers halfway across the globe can handle it.
Globalization itself is more of a neutral phenomenon, but gets skewed by erecting barriers that only allow some people to benefit. In the face of a globlized economy, workers must be as free to travel as the money is.
It happened to a company I used to work at. After they allowed for full remote work they went from maybe 75 US-based account managers to 4, with the rest in the Philippines. I know a number of...
It happened to a company I used to work at. After they allowed for full remote work they went from maybe 75 US-based account managers to 4, with the rest in the Philippines. I know a number of people that moved from the Bay Area to Sacramento thinking they had it made - Bay salary in a cheaper city while they were working fully remotely. They might all be fine now with a new remote job, but I suspect it'll be a story that will repeat itself over and over if they stay in their line of work.
Business leaders think that the spread of remote work has had more negative effects than positive ones, but they also see the practice becoming ingrained, according to a new survey by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said remote work had a negative impact in four areas: workplace culture, cohesiveness and team environment, communication among employees, and training and mentorship. The upside for employers: more than half said that work-from-home makes it easier to recruit staff, and more than two-thirds said it helps to retain them.
I'm senior leadership in Data, this is a downside of remote work. It sounds ... inane? But actually some of these things are really important IF you want to progress quickly. But it's more than...
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said remote work had a negative impact in four areas: workplace culture, cohesiveness and team environment, communication among employees, and training and mentorship.
I'm senior leadership in Data, this is a downside of remote work. It sounds ... inane? But actually some of these things are really important IF you want to progress quickly. But it's more than senior leadership rarely adapts to new things and just wants the status quo, despite how much more beneficial it is for workers to have flexibility.
We agreed one day a month in the office, but that is not "come to the office and code". It's an in-office out-of-office, I.e. "Don't get me on Teams, Slack, Zoom... I'm here to talk and socialise with my team" and it has worked amazingly.
Come to the office, Refinement, Sprint Plans, Storymappings, Retros and pints / activities. That's how the office SHOULD be used, not as a place to break spirits.
Genuinely glad it works for you buddy, but not every team is the same. I have some teams (squads) who do things almost fully remote and then a human session every quarter... through the in person...
Since I transitioned to fully home working, I'm much more productive and happy.
I absolutely don't need to be breathing the same air as team members to be able to collaborate on these things. Why does that make it easier?
Genuinely glad it works for you buddy, but not every team is the same. I have some teams (squads) who do things almost fully remote and then a human session every quarter... through the in person once a week teams. The average agreement is once a month generally. It's whatever works for the team, not management.
Also, fairly recently, over 4 hours a day of my time was being requested to work on sprint planning type meetings, followed by much wailing that things were going slowly. Well, okay? You are surprised why?
Christ. That's painful and NOT how these things should work at all. Sorry to hear you got put through that ringer buddy. Yeah, I've got an Analytics team who like Kanban. Scrum works well for DE's...
Christ. That's painful and NOT how these things should work at all. Sorry to hear you got put through that ringer buddy.
Yeah, I've got an Analytics team who like Kanban. Scrum works well for DE's and SE's... but it needs to be balanced so well.
Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a face-to-face conversation. A lot of stuff can go much more quickly when everyone involved is in the same space and can pick up on all the nuance communicated...
I absolutely don't need to be breathing the same air as team members to be able to collaborate on these things.
Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a face-to-face conversation.
A lot of stuff can go much more quickly when everyone involved is in the same space and can pick up on all the nuance communicated by tone, body language, and other intangibles. Video calls are a narrow funnel; you can only really have a single interaction going on at a time. Email is (or can be) great for depth of communication, but conversations are far slower than in-person. Text chat is more responsive than email, but still slower than in-person.
When you're in person, all sorts of little things add up to make a more productive whole.
This is, of course, an ideal situation. Far too many organizations have meetings—in-person or online—when email, text chat, or video chat would have worked better. A poorly-run meeting is a waste of time regardless, but if it's a poorly-run remote meeting maybe you can get in some productivity on the side. But there are benefits to in-person meetings and a effective organization might well decide that there's a rhythm to scheduling and facilitating periodic in-person things to keep everything running smoothly.
I don't think either I or @Pioneer was saying that it's a good idea to be in person every day. But occasional in-person days can be beneficial. Beneficial enough, even, to offset the hassle of...
I don't think either I or @Pioneer was saying that it's a good idea to be in person every day. But occasional in-person days can be beneficial. Beneficial enough, even, to offset the hassle of having everyone travel to some common location for that day.
Similar position here and I legit just asked our Product Manager when do the developers actually have time to actually develop or learn the software (moved development team regions "recently") as...
Also, fairly recently, over 4 hours a day of my time was being requested to work on sprint planning type meetings, followed by much wailing that things were going slowly. Well, okay? You are surprised why?
Similar position here and I legit just asked our Product Manager when do the developers actually have time to actually develop or learn the software (moved development team regions "recently") as it's been two years but they are still fundamentally learning this massive and legacy code base and struggle with it as what used to be a few days is now weeks or multiple sprints to make work due to the devs spending so much time in just sprint and planning meetings, generic other meetings that they are "required" and "security" review that could barely keep one from laughing at what they are considering "security" in code.
Thankfully some of the more senior but not part of the region developers are leading a strike back slowly but it's worming thru and might finally get into their heads.
This is a very good idea and i would like the company i work for would apply something like this. The very idea to commute, go to the office to respect the quota and... zoom call around the clock...
really important IF you want to progress quickly. But it's more than senior leadership rarely adapts to new things and just wants the status quo, despite how much more beneficial it is for workers to have flexibility.
We agreed one day a month in the office, but that is not "come to the office and code". It's an in-office out-of-office, I.e. "Don't get me on Teams, Slack, Zoom... I'm here to talk and socialise with my team" and it has worked amazingly.
Come to the office, Refinement, Sprint Plans, Storymappings, Retros and pints / activities. That's how the office SHOULD be used, not as a place to break spirits.
This is a very good idea and i would like the company i work for would apply something like this.
The very idea to commute, go to the office to respect the quota and... zoom call around the clock drives me crazy (and it happens all the time i go there).
That would be probably useful to really create a "workplace culture" that otherwise i have no idea what it really means or allow me to know my colleagues a little bit more outside of the usual coffee break where noone talks about anything and just whines about zoom calls and stress :)
Yeah. I very much have the "I'm in the office, is it urgent?" question that goes to people. It forces people to reassess if it is actually urgent. We refer to it as "digital first", but then it's...
The very idea to commute, go to the office to respect the quota and... zoom call around the clock drives me crazy (and it happens all the time i go there).
Yeah. I very much have the "I'm in the office, is it urgent?" question that goes to people.
It forces people to reassess if it is actually urgent.
That would be probably useful to really create a "workplace culture" that otherwise i have no idea what it really means or allow me to know my colleagues a little bit more outside of the usual coffee break where noone talks about anything and just whines about zoom calls and stress :)
We refer to it as "digital first", but then it's a purely social day that just helps so much.
It forces interaction beyond those mild mannered bore fests of griping.
My team does the same. Everyone is free to come to the office as much or as little ad they want and every two weeks we have our in person team days, where we do only meetings and socializing...
My team does the same. Everyone is free to come to the office as much or as little ad they want and every two weeks we have our in person team days, where we do only meetings and socializing things. Works great for us.
It helps that our company adopted a flex-desk type of arrangement, where one can book a desk online for the day with options ranging from two person offices to co-working open floor situations. So something in there for everyone.
Since doing this for a couple of month, I discovered how much I like this hybrid style, especially since my living situation does not allow for a separate office space at home, only a desk in the living room. It is nice to be able to get away from my at-home workload once in a while and also be able to stay home when family live demands it.
I understand people that can work fully remote and at the same time, after having tried that, I appreciate having shared in person experiences with my team mates and colleagues. It helps me put an image to that person.
That would be so helpful. Our place has created a tech sector internally of 600 people, the office is a 120 capacity office... I've got space at home, but I just need that human aspect due to ADHD...
It helps that our company adopted a flex-desk type of arrangement, where one can book a desk online for the day with options ranging from two person offices to co-working open floor situations. So something in there for everyone.
That would be so helpful. Our place has created a tech sector internally of 600 people, the office is a 120 capacity office...
Since doing this for a couple of month, I discovered how much I like this hybrid style, especially since my living situation does not allow for a separate office space at home, only a desk in the living room. It is nice to be able to get away from my at-home workload once in a while and also be able to stay home when family live demands it.
I've got space at home, but I just need that human aspect due to ADHD and generally going a little psychotic over Covid you know? It's just that flexibility to work by person and by team that we need from people. This mandated nonsense is ridiculous.
I understand people that can work fully remote and at the same time, after having tried that, I appreciate having shared in person experiences with my team mates and colleagues. It helps me put an image to that person.
Literally all of those things dramatically improved at my company as a result of remote work. Being forced to get around geographical boundaries was a game-changer. Permanent teams and working...
Roughly two-thirds of respondents said remote work had a negative impact in four areas: workplace culture, cohesiveness and team environment, communication among employees, and training and mentorship.
Literally all of those things dramatically improved at my company as a result of remote work. Being forced to get around geographical boundaries was a game-changer. Permanent teams and working groups stopped being organised around who was physically proximate, but who had the right combination of skills and insights. Online meetings had focus and purpose. Screen-sharing meant real-time adaptive presentation instead of static, pre-prepared slides.
I was offered a mentorship by a leader in my field who wasn't local to me. Democratisation of access to national functions, like mine, instead of unconsciously defaulting to local focus because of the state you happened to be in.
We were on fire. But as soon as it was permitted, "back to normal" was the driving philosophy, and with it, a return to performance mediocracy and productivity theatre.
I fought to be made an exception and remain remote. I leveraged the reclaimed dead hours and energy sink of commuting to gain a postgraduate degree in Business Administration, and I'm working on a second in Data Science. I'm not being paid at my now higher level of qualification. I know they know I know that. I'm fine with this in the short term, trading off for the accommodation to my needs as long as I'm studying.
But goddamn it's frustrating to see the single-minded commitment to traditionalism over excellence. My line manager is with me. The global VP sings the same tune. It's the layers of management in between who are stuck on biases of what conventional business looks like. One letting the admission slip, that the data supports remote-first but doesn't like the "vibe" of a too-quiet office.
I'm so torn between not wanting to come across as gloating when I'm afforded a rare privilege in working from my home office, and the desire to beat people over the head with the squandered gains and the talent they're letting walk.
It is far from perfect, but Lucidchart is generally fast and intuitive enough to do rough and ready diagrams on the fly. Drawing boxes and lines is not as easy as white boarding, but it might be...
It is far from perfect, but Lucidchart is generally fast and intuitive enough to do rough and ready diagrams on the fly. Drawing boxes and lines is not as easy as white boarding, but it might be balanced out by the ability to type or paste text, to paste images to use as a starting point, and the ability to edit / move things around. Nesting boxes does not work very well, so if you avoid that, things will go better.
For flowcharts, which is what I spend a lot of time doing, I like Lucidchart. For random collaborative whiteboard stuff, we use Miro. There's been a general push from our company to move...
For flowcharts, which is what I spend a lot of time doing, I like Lucidchart. For random collaborative whiteboard stuff, we use Miro. There's been a general push from our company to move everything to Miro because I guess it's cheaper than Lucidchart but I don't think it does diagrams as well.
I'll preface this by saying I am extremely lucky to be in the position I'm in. I realize that a lot of jobs can't be done remotely. And they are often the toughest, hardest jobs. I'm also lucky that my boss has the exact opposite feelings of the bosses described in the article. He is 100% on board with us being remote.
I work in video and television production, so almost all of my job can be done remotely. I work from home most of the time and occasionally go to events to film or live broadcasts to do on site switching. But if I'm just editing, why should I be in an office when I'm mostly working solo on a project? I don't need to be around others to edit video. I'm actually more efficient because I'm not distracted by people outside of my door talking or any of the million other distractions that happen in an office.
There are a few other people in my department and we have a weekly Zoom meeting where we discuss any upcoming events/projects and give one another a heads up on anything we might need assistance/collaboration on.
I'm also extremely lucky that everyone in my department is very self sufficient. We all know what are jobs are and don't need much direction. I think having that ability to self-direct is crucial if you're working from home. There are times when I don't talk to my boss for a week or two beyond an email saying, "Here's a new project." My boss knows he can trust us to get work done and manage ourselves.
As for downsides...I'm the "new guy" and I've been there five years. Everyone else has been there for ten or more years. I think that makes a big difference. I can see how onboarding a new person would be more difficult remotely. Especially when it comes to figuring out the group culture of a workplace.
Be rude once and it stops.
Had this happen when I was in an office with a similar headphones=leave me alone rule. They stood there, I tapped my headphones, shook my head, and waved them off. They didn't leave. Slowly paused my music, took off my headphones, held up my finger to stop them talking while I took a drink of water, then asked curtly "What?'
It was a pointless interruption, I told them frankly to not disturb me again and send an email or IM if they needed to discuss something like that, and put my headphones back on while they were still talking. It stopped.
Not a problem now as I'm long out of that office and offices at all. My worst coworker annoyance now is a programmer that doesn't just outright ask a question he has, but always starts with "hey" via Teams and waits for a response before asking.
God I hate these people. I had my status on slack as an emoji of a crossed out waiving hand and said "If you only say Hey I'm ignoring you" for months until my district manager asked me to change it. Our IT contractors still start every interaction with just a "hey" and I just ignore them unless I know why they are reaching out and I'll just jump into answering their unasked question.
Hey.
......
......
Can you give me a call?
......
I just died inside.
I always wait at least 30 minutes to respond to those.
Oh god, this kills me too. Some of my colleagues will IM me on teams with "Hello bonedriven" and expect a response - which despite never receiving does not seem to disabuse them of the habit.
I'm lucky in that it's my own manager who has a message with that link as his status. I appreciate his doing so and basically setting that expectation team-wide so that I don't have to seem rude about it.
Oh my god. Thank you for this.
I have stopped replying to hey/hi/hello and just leave people on read.
Probably because that’s a very childish way of dealing with an issue.
You could replace the "What?" with a very mature and sophisticated version of "please leave me alone during work regarding unrelated matters" and the point still stands. Office chatterboxes do not care about you. They want something to talk at. You have to dislodge the notion that you are a comfortable place to feed their habit.
They are not "office chatterboxes;" they are human beings. You should treat people with respect, especially if their crime is talking to you. You're dehumanizing them and rationalizing poor treatment by generalizing that they don't care about you.
their crime is talking at me, not too me. They aren't giving due respect to my time or attention, you make it sound like I consider them animals
And they're due respect, but not at the expense of my own well being, I can only be one sidedly generous for so long. I'm referring to repeated behavior, missing polite social cues that I don't appreciate the way they're treating me, and the need to be explicit.
Respect is earned, not given.
If you don't respect my time even with ample amounts of clues, I you haven't earned a respectful answer. You'll get an annoyed "What?!"
PG's Maker vs Manager schedule is a good read: http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html
The chatterboxes are usually on a manager schedule, I am not. Interruptions is how they work. I work when I'm not interrupted.
I agree; respect is earned. But I believe it's earned by the fact that they're a human being. They don't need to conform to whatever expectations you're placing on their interactions for you to treat them without contempt.
Again, to reiterate: they treat me with contempt by not respecting my need to focus.
Why should I be the one that's being courteous just because I'm the quiet one in the interaction?
As much as I hate those kinds of interactions, the poster talking about general human respect has a point. How about we reframe the situation a little to understand it better. What would your reaction be if your partner or child did the same thing. Would you also react with the same level of disrespect? Maybe what they want to discuss is important to them, but trivial and unimportant to you. Maybe someone prompted them, directly or indirectly, to interrupt you. At the end of the day, we are all humans and extending some level of tolerance for actions we dislike it what makes coexistence possible.
I am willing to use Hanlon's Razor for the first few interruptions for every person. But what if it keeps happening for weeks and months, no matter how directly I communicate my need for complete focus?
At which point can I stop being respectful and start assuming malice instead of stupidity?
It's especially frustrating with a brain like mine which cannot handle rapidly switching between tasks. I can be in an incredibly productive groove and if I'm interrupted by something unimportant but requires more than a modicum of thought then my momentum is gone. You may have only taken five minutes of my time but you easily wasted an hour of my productivity.
Yep that happened to me. I snapped and firmly expressed my desire to be left alone during work hours re: inane bullshit conversations, especially if I'm busy.
And then had a meeting with my boss about being a team player and workplace temperament. Coworker never bothered me again though.
Don't miss that job at all.
Not really. Most people are, for lack of a better word,
cowardsnon-confrontational. They don't like the idea of risking pissing someone off.The "not a team player" thing would hold weight if it was something important and job related, to which you wouldn't respond with "Don't bother me again." and requires the person wasting time to have reported it which also goes against their non-confrontational ways. If they do, you tell the higher up bringing it up that they interrupted your time critical, high dollar work to talk about "inappropriate-in-a-workplace" topics leaving the subject open to interpretation.
You are magically no longer bothered by the time waster and the time waster stops being a little tattletale when someone tells them to stop wasting time.
I'm not here to make friends, I'm here to work, when my work suffers because of the wasting of time by others and upper management elects to not resolve it or I am reprimanded for it, then that's on their ass and I make sure it's known to be their fault. It doesn't require clout or seniority, just requires that you be good at your job, as your managers are just as spineless as the rest of them, don't like being told the facts of the matter either, and ultimately someone up the chain will agree that wasting my time is a more serious offense than someone getting their feelings hurt. Add to the fact that your manager's manager's manager is going to get real ticked about your manager and manager's manager wasting their time with a meeting about me telling someone to stop wasting mine.
Everybody's got a boss, when the CEO says it's okay for people to waste time on the clock, I'll stop telling people to stop wasting mine.
We have an informal expectation at my workplace that folks can advertise that they follow "nohello", which basically means that if you message them, all details need to be in the initial message. It prevents this sort of needless wait for the core of the communication.
I’m lucky enough to work in a building that doesn’t really have many cubicles. Almost everyone has their own office. So I could always just close the door if I didn’t want to be too distracted.
Again, I’m super lucky that I had my own office.
I recently started a 100% remote (programming) job and, yes, the onboarding probably took a little longer. The company is really good about it: I've offered to go to the office for a while if it would be helpful, but they are happy with the way things are. (Me too; it's about four hours away, so I would have to get a hotel).
Anyway, I definitely work harder, longer, and more diligently from home than I ever did from an office.
Bring back cubicles and offices too. I live 15 minutes away from my office, but I won't go back because I hate the "bull pen" style desk arrangement.
Bull pens work only if you have a team of people who work on the same thing and they benefit from the ability to just look over and chat with others.
It does NOT work if you have multiple bull pens with unrelated teams with no visual or auditory blocks in the way. A.k.a open plan office.
It doesn't even work then because sometimes you need to work without distractions or feeling like people are constantly looking over your shoulder.
Build dedicated collaboration spaces for when people need to work together, but let them have private spaces for when they need to be heads down.
If you need to worry about people looking over your shoulder, either your team's seating arrangement or composition needs some work.
I'm not talking about a "team" that's 20 people, I'm talking about the "backend developer team" that's like 3 people and a trainee in a small room with a whiteboard or two.
They should do that anyway, but I wonder why some more established companies don’t build a campus in a smaller community with lower housing prices that wants to grow.
preexisting office space is cheaper, surely.
But when it comes to constructing new downtown offices vs creating flatter campuses or office parks in smaller communities, it's probably an ego thing with management. They can afford to live close and like the status of working and living near downtown. You move the office into the country where the pions work, and suddenly that luxury bayside apartment doesn't mean much.
I feel like the general public is failing to consider long term side effects of racing into the telework singularity. Breaking down the barriers to place accelerates globalization of the workforce and when followed as a trend, will likely expose domestic workers to competition from cheaper, off shore labor.
As a local, part of your value proposition is that you’re close enough to the center of gravity to be responsive, anticipative, and worth investing in. This race to abstract workers into digital feeds, I fear, will have deleterious side effects that we don’t yet fully understand.
This is solidly something in the downside column, and a phenomenon that I've had a front row seat to.
My current company transitioned to fully-remote once the pandemic started, and things were whirring along fairly well. We had augmented our domestic engineering teams with a few global contractors mainly because domestic talent was incredibly hard to recruit. Then when the economy started taking a dump, we had some significant layoffs who were almost exclusively domestic-based. We've since hired on developers exclusively from Eastern Europe, all on a contract basis, and now over half the team is based out of there.
Meanwhile, our leadership is writing thought pieces about how companies need to offer greater benefits for US workers, and focus on improving gender and racial diversity, while they're hiring almost exclusively white dudes from Belarus who have no benefits. And we're a "mission-driven" company.
Yes, there is plenty of that already, but I think geopolitics, legal differences, and cultural differences will continue to make borders important?
This is true even in manufacturing. Toyota builds cars in the US for good reasons. TSMC is building a chip plant in Arizona. Globalization overshot a bit. Where you do things still matters.
Meanwhile legal differences mean that many European companies strongly prefer to use a data center in Europe, so the data center companies have adjusted. There's no physical reason for this, but culture matters.
The world is an uncontrolled experiment and predictions are difficult, but I expect there will be a mix of organizations where some almost entirely rely on remote work and others prefer to work in the same place. I don't think either one has such a decisive advantage that it wins over the other in most situations.
(Until there's another pandemic.)
Of course. Nobody is in a hurry to make coal miners into a digital workforce. My point is that there is an ongoing shakeup in the generation and distribution of value in the white collar labor market, reinforced by mounting social pressure on companies to go remote against their better judgement.
We’ve broken the seal on the domain of white collar work that generations of young professionals aspire to, and exposed its innards to the global markets. With history as a guide, there will certainly be tax structures, laws, regulations, and protectionist practices in an effort to curb this trend, but I don’t trust that when the dust settles we’re going to like where this has taken us.
I’ve always worried about having to compete against everyone in the entire country instead of just everyone in the local area. I have to remind myself that while it’s far more competitive for me, it also means I have the potential to apply to any position in the entire country, and employers have to offer more competitive packages.
Exactly. Bay Area company no longer bound to paying Bay Area wages. But employer in Kansas can't get away with paying average Kansas wages either.
It extends globlly, which only becomes a major problem if outside factors (like hard limits on migration) prevent the workforce from being as mobile as the jobs.
It'll go the same as outsourcing your IT: a massive outsourcing boom, then a hard reigning in because it actually sort of sucked from day one, and then back to internal teams.
I'm not too worried about this one. It almost always ends up being lower quality.
I mean, one of the big reccuring problems that results in the waxing and waning of global recruiting is language and culture barriers and timezone differences.
Having people on your team that speak the native language of the customer base is helpful. This can also be used for positive building of globalization...let the India team focus on India market, rather than relying on them to do all the work for all the markets.
If there's one thing bosses dislike more than not having people in offices, it's having them across multiple timezones making meetings impossible.
On the flip side, globalizing more of the workforce will, in theory, help equalize inequality a bit. Wages for $250k devlopers go down, but 5 people get lifted out of poverty...that kind of thing.
Having a global presence means covering on-call rotations is easier...fewer 3 AM wakeups if the workers halfway across the globe can handle it.
Globalization itself is more of a neutral phenomenon, but gets skewed by erecting barriers that only allow some people to benefit. In the face of a globlized economy, workers must be as free to travel as the money is.
It happened to a company I used to work at. After they allowed for full remote work they went from maybe 75 US-based account managers to 4, with the rest in the Philippines. I know a number of people that moved from the Bay Area to Sacramento thinking they had it made - Bay salary in a cheaper city while they were working fully remotely. They might all be fine now with a new remote job, but I suspect it'll be a story that will repeat itself over and over if they stay in their line of work.
From the article:
I'm senior leadership in Data, this is a downside of remote work. It sounds ... inane? But actually some of these things are really important IF you want to progress quickly. But it's more than senior leadership rarely adapts to new things and just wants the status quo, despite how much more beneficial it is for workers to have flexibility.
We agreed one day a month in the office, but that is not "come to the office and code". It's an in-office out-of-office, I.e. "Don't get me on Teams, Slack, Zoom... I'm here to talk and socialise with my team" and it has worked amazingly.
Come to the office, Refinement, Sprint Plans, Storymappings, Retros and pints / activities. That's how the office SHOULD be used, not as a place to break spirits.
Genuinely glad it works for you buddy, but not every team is the same. I have some teams (squads) who do things almost fully remote and then a human session every quarter... through the in person once a week teams. The average agreement is once a month generally. It's whatever works for the team, not management.
Good lord your Scrummaster needs shooting.
Christ. That's painful and NOT how these things should work at all. Sorry to hear you got put through that ringer buddy.
Yeah, I've got an Analytics team who like Kanban. Scrum works well for DE's and SE's... but it needs to be balanced so well.
Glad you're somewhere better buddy.
Don't underestimate the bandwidth of a face-to-face conversation.
A lot of stuff can go much more quickly when everyone involved is in the same space and can pick up on all the nuance communicated by tone, body language, and other intangibles. Video calls are a narrow funnel; you can only really have a single interaction going on at a time. Email is (or can be) great for depth of communication, but conversations are far slower than in-person. Text chat is more responsive than email, but still slower than in-person.
When you're in person, all sorts of little things add up to make a more productive whole.
This is, of course, an ideal situation. Far too many organizations have meetings—in-person or online—when email, text chat, or video chat would have worked better. A poorly-run meeting is a waste of time regardless, but if it's a poorly-run remote meeting maybe you can get in some productivity on the side. But there are benefits to in-person meetings and a effective organization might well decide that there's a rhythm to scheduling and facilitating periodic in-person things to keep everything running smoothly.
I don't think either I or @Pioneer was saying that it's a good idea to be in person every day. But occasional in-person days can be beneficial. Beneficial enough, even, to offset the hassle of having everyone travel to some common location for that day.
This is my take on it too. The balance is a bit tricky, though, and probably depends a bit on the specific situation.
Similar position here and I legit just asked our Product Manager when do the developers actually have time to actually develop or learn the software (moved development team regions "recently") as it's been two years but they are still fundamentally learning this massive and legacy code base and struggle with it as what used to be a few days is now weeks or multiple sprints to make work due to the devs spending so much time in just sprint and planning meetings, generic other meetings that they are "required" and "security" review that could barely keep one from laughing at what they are considering "security" in code.
Thankfully some of the more senior but not part of the region developers are leading a strike back slowly but it's worming thru and might finally get into their heads.
This is a very good idea and i would like the company i work for would apply something like this.
The very idea to commute, go to the office to respect the quota and... zoom call around the clock drives me crazy (and it happens all the time i go there).
That would be probably useful to really create a "workplace culture" that otherwise i have no idea what it really means or allow me to know my colleagues a little bit more outside of the usual coffee break where noone talks about anything and just whines about zoom calls and stress :)
Yeah. I very much have the "I'm in the office, is it urgent?" question that goes to people.
It forces people to reassess if it is actually urgent.
We refer to it as "digital first", but then it's a purely social day that just helps so much.
It forces interaction beyond those mild mannered bore fests of griping.
My team does the same. Everyone is free to come to the office as much or as little ad they want and every two weeks we have our in person team days, where we do only meetings and socializing things. Works great for us.
It helps that our company adopted a flex-desk type of arrangement, where one can book a desk online for the day with options ranging from two person offices to co-working open floor situations. So something in there for everyone.
Since doing this for a couple of month, I discovered how much I like this hybrid style, especially since my living situation does not allow for a separate office space at home, only a desk in the living room. It is nice to be able to get away from my at-home workload once in a while and also be able to stay home when family live demands it.
I understand people that can work fully remote and at the same time, after having tried that, I appreciate having shared in person experiences with my team mates and colleagues. It helps me put an image to that person.
That would be so helpful. Our place has created a tech sector internally of 600 people, the office is a 120 capacity office...
I've got space at home, but I just need that human aspect due to ADHD and generally going a little psychotic over Covid you know? It's just that flexibility to work by person and by team that we need from people. This mandated nonsense is ridiculous.
You got it.
Literally all of those things dramatically improved at my company as a result of remote work. Being forced to get around geographical boundaries was a game-changer. Permanent teams and working groups stopped being organised around who was physically proximate, but who had the right combination of skills and insights. Online meetings had focus and purpose. Screen-sharing meant real-time adaptive presentation instead of static, pre-prepared slides.
I was offered a mentorship by a leader in my field who wasn't local to me. Democratisation of access to national functions, like mine, instead of unconsciously defaulting to local focus because of the state you happened to be in.
We were on fire. But as soon as it was permitted, "back to normal" was the driving philosophy, and with it, a return to performance mediocracy and productivity theatre.
I fought to be made an exception and remain remote. I leveraged the reclaimed dead hours and energy sink of commuting to gain a postgraduate degree in Business Administration, and I'm working on a second in Data Science. I'm not being paid at my now higher level of qualification. I know they know I know that. I'm fine with this in the short term, trading off for the accommodation to my needs as long as I'm studying.
But goddamn it's frustrating to see the single-minded commitment to traditionalism over excellence. My line manager is with me. The global VP sings the same tune. It's the layers of management in between who are stuck on biases of what conventional business looks like. One letting the admission slip, that the data supports remote-first but doesn't like the "vibe" of a too-quiet office.
I'm so torn between not wanting to come across as gloating when I'm afforded a rare privilege in working from my home office, and the desire to beat people over the head with the squandered gains and the talent they're letting walk.
Mirror for those hit by the paywall:
https://archive.is/P77Cf
So for the designers that work remotely, what have you found to replace white boarding and sketch sessions?
It is far from perfect, but Lucidchart is generally fast and intuitive enough to do rough and ready diagrams on the fly. Drawing boxes and lines is not as easy as white boarding, but it might be balanced out by the ability to type or paste text, to paste images to use as a starting point, and the ability to edit / move things around. Nesting boxes does not work very well, so if you avoid that, things will go better.
For flowcharts, which is what I spend a lot of time doing, I like Lucidchart. For random collaborative whiteboard stuff, we use Miro. There's been a general push from our company to move everything to Miro because I guess it's cheaper than Lucidchart but I don't think it does diagrams as well.