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Are you having any (professional) "I told you so" moments?
It could be positive ("I'm so glad I convinced Management to let us set up for working remotely" or "I'm so happy we tested for a ridiculous setting on scalability testing") or negative ("If you had let me set up the server to [whatever] we would not be in this pickle").
It's not quite along the lines of your examples, but lots of us complained that open offices with unassigned desks are basically petri dishes. I wonder if/how this changes the direction companies take in the future.
Wow, where I worked as an intern was well climate controlled and I never smelled anyone else's sweat. One intern got accosted for using copious amounts of a deodorant in a public space, but aside from that I can never remember any BO problems.
As someone who has done paired programming for well over 10,000 hours (that's actually only about 5 years full time), I resent this stereotype. I think I've had one person who's BO was noticable.
I don't mean to sound condescending, but why didn't someone tell them? The environment that I leaned pair programming in, that's a basic kind of conversation pairs should have. If pairs aren't giving basic feedback to each other continually, then they aren't really pairing they're just sitting close together.
I don't know GP's reasons, but I know that at places I've worked, some people wouldn't be receptive to the information no matter how it was presented, and it would just waste time and build resentment. It's a "choose you battles" sort of situation.
That's probably the key difference. The job I learned pairing at also screened employees for the ability to receive feedback. If someone wouldn't listen to constructive criticism, that would actually have been grounds for letting them go.
Not two months ago I told my client "You guys are really lax about stress testing your business continuity and contingency plans. . ."
Also, I warned another client who was planning to cut staff in their SOC because they figured they had an ML model that flags aberrant behavior and doesn't need as many analysts to figure stuff out.
But now everyone's working from home. Guess what happens to your machine learning models when ALL the unstated assumptions embedded in your training data sets no longer apply suckas!?
Yeah, it will be interesting to read about machine learning failures after this is over.
When I told the data science triumphalists I work with that they really need think harder about what sorts of constraints the methodology imposes on our ability to generalize our findings, they all said I was too fussy and that's just my stuffy academia/public policy background talking. We can just solve any validity issues with MOAR AND BIGGER DATAS they said.
Not so! It turns out. Maybe Data Science certification courses should have spent more time on the latter part of the term. (Sorry, I'm not bitter or anything. Certainly not.)
I posted this on March 11th.
For context, our schools shut down, not 48 hours later, on March 13th.
If I weren't still so worried it would be nice to pat myself on the back a bit for how right I was, but I really can't revel in that feeling. Instead I'm feeling worse now than I was then. I just want people to be safe and healthy, but things are not looking good right now, especially in the US.
I don't know what level of education you work in, but that sounds somewhat similar to my experience as a college student.
We went from "dunno" to campus closed in just over 2 days. Additionally, I had a lot of professors tell us this was all overblown and we shouldn't be afraid to go out and enjoy our new time off.
The only thing different is that it seems college admin had been discussing the idea of moving online, so there was at least a dialogue on how things would transition. But I don't think anyone expected online instruction would need to last so long, and there was basically no plan for how labs would transition. Honestly I'm still waiting for the email telling me my lab is just cancelled because there's no real way to do it online with our level of preparedness.
That working remotely doesn't make you less productive.
That it can be a benefit to not be available for constant interruptions from your teammates.
Edit: To be clear, I should have said "That working remotely doesn't make me less productive," or "That working remotely doesn't inherently make one less productive." I realize that it does make some people less productive and is not possible with some jobs.
Totally depends on the person though, some people need to get out of their house to be productive.
It depends on the person and the job. I should say that I am a computer programmer, and I already worked from home 1 day/week before this thing started. (And before this job I had my own business and worked from home 7 days a week.) But that's totally valid. I was thinking more in terms of bosses believing that if you don't have someone looking over your shoulder throughout the day then you'll spend the entire time screwing off.
Same here. I miss the choice of being able to go into my office, but I was already full equipped to work remotely indefinitely. Ergo desk, 3 monitor setup, dedicated office space, etc. The hard part has been tagteaming childcare with my wife since daycare is closed - a 2-year-old is more likely to interrupt my productivity than coworkers.
Pitching in to say I've been running at 10% capacity for the past 3 weeks. Working from home really isn't my thing.
I think it's also hard to separate whether that's because of working from home, or because of the coronavirus situation and all the related aspects.
I've been really unproductive lately too, but nothing's changed at all for work environment.
Por que no los dos? I used to work from home 1-2 days a week, but I've also been unproductive lately - I've had some bad personal stuff happen on top of the virus that is exacerbated greatly by being in isolation. I'm trying, but I can only hope people at work will be understanding that it might be a bit before I'm back to even close to normal capacity. I miss office. :(
Stress-brain doesn't work well in general for long periods of concentration required for programming. I keep walking into rooms and forgetting why I'm there, or drifting off mid-sentence. Earlier today I tried to turn off the bathroom faucet with the light switch. Rough.
I'm so sorry to hear that! I hope you feel better soon. I get where you're coming from.
Sending (distant but sincere) hugs. We all will get through this, together. Apart, but together.
I have this link saved specifically because I send it to people a lot.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2907136/#!po=0.212766
TLDR: stress literally makes people dumber. Long term stress can permanently alter the physical structure if your brain.
I can confirm this from the other side. The last week I was at work, before our schools cancelled, I was completely unproductive and got absolutely nothing done. My productivity has actually increased since I started working from home, though I'm still nowhere near my usual output. All of it is because the current world situation and its related anxieties are occupying so much of my bandwidth.
I've worked at home for most of my career, but have been really unproductive for the past few weeks. It's really hard to get into the creative zone.
Same, though creativity isn't really my profession but more like a hobby. Think l just need some internet offtime for a while, let thoughts run free, etc.
It can be for some people, but not for the parents I know.
One positive (?) is that I think we all have become more forgiving of our coworkers. As well as their pets and children.
Overheard on Twitter, from a lawyer: "Things I never thought I'd say: 'Sorry, Your Honor. That was my dog.'"
Yeah, it definitely takes some planning in those situations. When I started my career my first employer (a large Fortune 100 telecom company) had rules about working at home that included things like:
etc.
The way we've been thrown into this has compounded the problem. But the idea that "people can only be productive when a boss is looking over their shoulder" is the type of thing I was thinking of. And certainly different people have different ways of working. I respect that.
Same here. Really funny how quickly we went through the following phases:
It didn't even take 10 days. We've been WFH for 2 weeks now.