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wfh is worth something like $50k/year to me roughly 25% The Fool fucked around with this message at 23:54 on Mar 5, 2024 |
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Mar 5, 2024 23:48
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Accurate pricing of your own free time is difficult, because you (probably) do not have a money factory that you can input arbitrary time into for some specific rate. Don't just use your calculated hourly rate, but also bear in mind that you're probably making enough that technically it makes financial sense to only eat out (which is pretty obviously not actually true)
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Mar 5, 2024 23:55
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Strong Sauce posted:I was actually coming in here to ask about this... how would one evaluate the value of WFH. For me each additional hour I spend at work (or devoted to it - a commute on even comfortable public transit is still time out of my life I have to dedicate to work) is more precious than the last. It goes up exponentially. As a thought experiment, let's say you had to work+commute 16 hours, and sleep 8, each day. No time for any hobbies, no time for family, can't go out for any reason, can't improve your prospects through education. How much would it be worth to you to suddenly get 1 hour of free time each day? I would venture to say "priceless." On the other hand, If you only worked 1 hour a day and suddenly had to work 2, that doesn't really impact your ability to do anything you want to do outside of a work context. Before remote became a thing, I was probably willing to give up at least a couple of tens of thousands of dollars in order to keep a walking commute to the office. I paid the price in higher rent, though I didn't reach my limit. That's me though; everyone's limit is personal and also depends on your environment and your current economic situation (it may be more valuable to you to save aggressively, and accept the loss of free time, for example), so there's no real good benchmark that can be widely applied.
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Mar 6, 2024 00:11
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Harriet Carker posted:$20/hour seems like an insanely undervalued estimate. i'm just doing that because i didn't want to have to keep representing it as "$X" while i was talking about it. it's just so i can use it as an example. but also.. Volmarias posted:Accurate pricing of your own free time is difficult, because you (probably) do not have a money factory that you can input arbitrary time into for some specific rate. which is why while i wouldn't say my time is only worth $20/hr it's not exactly my salary hourly rate either. that obviously is something else worth considering. Che Delilas posted:For me each additional hour I spend at work (or devoted to it - a commute on even comfortable public transit is still time out of my life I have to dedicate to work) is more precious than the last. It goes up exponentially. right, i can't really write a heuristic for every single person's schedule but thinking of a base line for a "normal" work schedule seems good. at least for me to think about it in those terms.
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Mar 6, 2024 01:17
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I think the value of WFH is pretty interesting and extremely personal. You can certainly calculate it in literal cost to you in terms of time + transportation + eating out associated with going into the office, but the answer is probably more reflective of how much do you hate physically being in the office amongst your co-workers. I personally despise it and wouldn't even take double my salary to go from my current full remote position to full time in office. I'd also probably be careful about broadcasting this sort of opinion to your employer since it puts you in a very weak position when salary reviews come around amongst other things. 
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Mar 6, 2024 01:53
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I would prefer six hour workdays, compensation for the commute and no working from home for anyone. WFH makes an awful job slightly more bearable, but I would prefer to enjoy my job, and I can only do that by directly interacting with people. I hope workplaces stratify into all-WFH or no-WFH, because I respect that it works for some people, but it totally destroys the kind of team dynamic I like when people start dropping off the grid.
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Mar 6, 2024 02:34
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thotsky posted:I would prefer six hour workdays, compensation for the commute and no working from home for anyone. WFH makes an awful job slightly more bearable, but I would prefer to enjoy my job, and I can only do that by directly interacting with people. I hope workplaces stratify into all-WFH or no-WFH, because I respect that it works for some people, but it totally destroys the kind of team dynamic I like when people start dropping off the grid. At my office we've gone to "mandatory" hybrid (3 days per week), and I think it's been really positive. I only started to realize how much I had been missing about being in person once we were back. So many little things are easier. A lot of my coworkers were unhappy, and I get that. At the same time, though, I think we're in a good place now. We're all supposed to be in the office on the same three days, but no one is actually enforcing it. If you have a reason to leave early, that's fine. If you need to take the whole day WFH because you're waiting for a plumber, that's fine. It feels like a happy medium between "you have to be in the office every day, no exceptions, be miserable" and "I haven't seen one of my team members outside of stand-up for months and I suspect he's working two jobs".
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Mar 6, 2024 04:27
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BAD AT STUFF posted:It feels like a happy medium between "you have to be in the office every day, no exceptions, be miserable" and "I haven't seen one of my team members outside of stand-up for months and I suspect he's working two jobs". Please do not snitch on a coworker who has managed to find ways to double their salary, TIA.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:01
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that poor bastard has to do two stand ups every day, leave them be No hell deeper than the one they’re already in
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Mar 6, 2024 05:15
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Volmarias posted:Please do not snitch on a coworker who has managed to find ways to double their salary, TIA. This shits dumb. The people hosed over by poo poo like that isn't your boss or the CEO, it's the coworkers who have to do extra work. Sure, if your company is so over hired they can disappear then who cares, but I haven't worked at a job like that in over a decade.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:19
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Falcon2001 posted:This shits dumb. The people hosed over by poo poo like that isn't your boss or the CEO, it's the coworkers who have to do extra work. Sure, if your company is so over hired they can disappear then who cares, but I haven't worked at a job like that in over a decade. If your management cannot tell if they're doing their work or not, it doesn't really matter if they are working two jobs, or just suck.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:27
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BAD AT STUFF posted:At my office we've gone to "mandatory" hybrid (3 days per week), and I think it's been really positive. I only started to realize how much I had been missing about being in person once we were back. So many little things are easier. But to thotsky's point, it does seem like we're at the point where folks should be either self-selecting into the role that fits them or moving past the grievance one way or another  Volmarias posted:Please do not snitch on a coworker who has managed to find ways to double their salary, TIA.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:34
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Volmarias posted:Please do not snitch on a coworker who has managed to find ways to double their salary, TIA. I'm not a narc 
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Mar 6, 2024 05:38
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That being said, I'm also not sorry that I don't have to work with that person anymore after some reorgs.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:40
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The last time I saw a coworker in person was close to 5 years ago and I would be happy to have that continue for the rest of my life.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:44
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Cugel the Clever posted:This is 100% where I'm at and it seems to be the preference of a number of my immediate coworkers, but those who are discontent are very vocal. I get some developers like to feel like they're an island or just believe that they can achieve the softer parts of the job (mentoring juniors; socializing knowledge; ad hoc ideation) just as effectively online, but I'm skeptical. I'm sure that after firing the guy, the position will be backfilled since you weren't able to cover the workload having a useless coworker cau- oh, you mean the position was eliminated and you still have to do the work? Don't snitch unless the person is actively making your job harder than if he simply didn't exist.
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Mar 6, 2024 05:49
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The problem with hybrid setups is that it has the downsides of both remote and in-office work: you still have to live somewhere you can commute from and maintain the means to commute, and have a home office; the company has to pay rent on an office, and manage distributed infrastructure and device management; and everybody spends half their time working the way they would prefer not to. CEOs trying to pitch hybrid RTO either don't know or don't care about the actual value of remote work, and foster animosity by trying disingenuously to frame it as a compromise or concession. But then, it's hardly a new phenomenon for business leaders to be out of touch.
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Mar 6, 2024 07:10
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I'm annoyed that we're going back to the office to 'facilitate communication', while there have been 0 attempts at improving communication in a remote setting (and my entire team is overseas). I guess that's at least consistent with how it works in the office, where management just assumes communication magically happens if you put people in the same room (preferably in your unpaid lunch break)
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Mar 6, 2024 07:59
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Bongo Bill posted:The problem with hybrid setups is that it has the downsides of both remote and in-office work: you still have to live somewhere you can commute from and maintain the means to commute, and have a home office; the company has to pay rent on an office, and manage distributed infrastructure and device management; and everybody spends half their time working the way they would prefer not to. I agree, hybrid is kind of the worst of both worlds.
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Mar 6, 2024 09:13
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We have a proper Colin Robinson in my work. He will cold call you instead of a sentence sent via slack. Apparently when we had the office he would just perch his bum on the edge of people's desks and start going off about whatever. I am never going back to office work. Visual studio live share makes pair programming a breeze remote. The only thing I miss is a good whiteboard session.
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Mar 6, 2024 09:25
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Volmarias posted:If your management cannot tell if they're doing their work or not, it doesn't really matter if they are working two jobs, or just suck. BAD AT STUFF posted:That being said, I'm also not sorry that I don't have to work with that person anymore after some reorgs. Both of these. I don't particularly care whether useless coworker is useless because he is quadruple jobbing or simply useless, I just want a useful coworker. But if your management thinks that forcing people into offices is going to solve the issue, they are bad and you are stuck with useless coworker either way.
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Mar 6, 2024 11:07
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I don't do it, but I am fairly confident that I could work two jobs without the quality or reliability of my work suffering. It would just eat into the time that I currently use for goofing off. Some of you may have more demanding jobs, though, and I respect that; it's why I'm sticking with mine.
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Mar 6, 2024 13:27
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I've hit a point in my career (Staff+) where I can churn out a day's worth of work in about two hours of focus time, and people are actually very happy with that level of commitment to my big rock project since it means there's basically zero chance of overcommitment or slippage. You really don't want to go faster than your coworkers across the business have attention to spare you, either. You'll end up with a bunch of stuff that's nominally important but has no ability to gain traction whatsoever The rest goes to generic developer advocacy stuff and randomly making the company smarter, and sure, I'm good with all my least productive work hours being undirected cultural contributions or popping up once per hour-long meeting with a recommendation that saves someone a few hours
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Mar 6, 2024 13:47
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Mega Comrade posted:The only thing I miss is a good whiteboard session. I've been doing live lucidchart diagramming over zoom for whiteboard sessions and it's really been fantastic. It took some practice to draw boxes and arrows quickly enough to keep up, but whiteboarding is a practiced skill anyway. Plus when you're done you're left with a digital artifact that can be updated, adjusted, and cleaned up. Way better than a glare-ridden photo of a whiteboard on my phone.
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Mar 6, 2024 14:57
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Lord help me, the longer I work in tech the more my job becomes about cat herding instead of programming and software design. A solid like, 80~90% of my job these days is going back and forth with half-baked bug and feature request stakeholders trying to tease out what exactly they need accomplished (and in my team’s case, how that’s expected to be accomplished) and rewording their requests and frantic DMs/tickets into something clear, collected, and actionable. Deadlines and time pressure make this so much more of a pain in the rear end, and when you throw owner turnover and churn into the mix everything turns into a confused morass of oh-gently caress-I-had-no-idea-this-document-existed. I’m coming up on 2.5 years at El Goog and I’m basically my own personal PM now. There’s no way I’m neurotypical so let’s just assume this is an ASD thing or whatever. I’m getting so amazingly sick of disorganized requests that get ball-dropped for months on end before getting hurled at us in a nearly invalid state. I’m of half a mind to just start restating my assigned tickets in a structured format that doesn’t contradict itself and have completely poo poo English. The work I do is derived from that format and nothing else - you want it done, you gotta greenlight my interpretation. Way I see it: if our apps have a bunch of contracts and structs to communicate between each other, so should the employees! Because I’ll be hosed if I listen to another rando team lead complain about how we screwed the pooch ever again! 
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Mar 6, 2024 16:26
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Pollyanna posted:Lord help me, the longer I work in tech the more my job becomes about cat herding instead of programming and software design.
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Mar 6, 2024 16:52
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Volmarias posted:I'm sure that after firing the guy, the position will be backfilled since you weren't able to cover the workload having a useless coworker cau- oh, you mean the position was eliminated and you still have to do the work? As for resourcing, roadmaps and expectations are going to be different if your team has 6 engineers instead of "7" (while everyone's still giving the 7th the benefit of the doubt). At least if you're somewhere that's not complete poo poo. Bongo Bill posted:The problem with hybrid setups is that it has the downsides of both remote and in-office work
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Mar 6, 2024 17:05
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Sagacity posted:Welcome! Am I senior now???? 
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Mar 6, 2024 17:07
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Pollyanna posted:I’m of half a mind to just start restating my assigned tickets in a structured format that doesn’t contradict itself and have completely poo poo English. The work I do is derived from that format and nothing else - you want it done, you gotta greenlight my interpretation.
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Mar 6, 2024 18:26
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Pollyanna posted:Am I senior now???? Sorry, no money for promo, but at least Sundar is thoughtful enough to not fire you via email (yet)
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Mar 6, 2024 19:35
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Pollyanna posted:Am I senior now????
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Mar 6, 2024 20:25
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M31 posted:I'm annoyed that we're going back to the office to 'facilitate communication', while there have been 0 attempts at improving communication in a remote setting (and my entire team is overseas). Maybe another goon can find it but there was a study about distance between co-workers and how often they communicate. It was like after 20-30 feet the people might as well not be in the same office because they won't interact with each other.
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Mar 8, 2024 22:55
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gariig posted:Maybe another goon can find it but there was a study about distance between co-workers and how often they communicate. It was like after 20-30 feet the people might as well not be in the same office because they won't interact with each other. I think this tracks with my experience. I don't really mind being in-office - to each their own - but I definitely don't like situations like hotel desking without reservations, where you can't even guarantee you're working near your coworkers. At that point there's basically zero upside.
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Mar 9, 2024 00:53
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Hotel desks are stupid, if you can't give someone a permanent desk then don't mandate that they come in. The office is expensive, and has both upsides and downsides - if you can't afford to do it right and actually maximize those upsides then you shouldn't do it at all.
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Mar 9, 2024 01:31
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That's ... not the point at all. Nobody gives a poo poo about "employee productivity" whatever that means (can anyone even quantify it like they did in the industrial age? do they even care to quantify it?). There are, as far as I can tell as being just a pleb, a few reasons to mandate return to office: - The CEO has a vested interest in the health of the local office real estate. Either directly or indirectly. - Desire to fire people without actually firing them. It doesn't matter who those people that leave are, the rest are gonna pick up the slack or else ... - There never was a way to monitor productivity, the middle managers are and always were useless, and with WFH it has become even more obvious. Stuff butts in seats in an attempt to justify the existence of layers of managers. - And, of course, there are those who feel they're losing the control they had over employees and they want it back. Those are usually just psychopaths. Unfortunately they make the majority of the Fortune 500 CEOs. Nothing else matters, really. Communication? As you all know, that's 100% bullshit, not today, not in the age of the internet. "Oh, but I can just drop by your desk". Every normal human being: "Please do not do that. I'm working on something, and you doing that will interrupt me. Want help? Ask on chat". As for shareholders? Buy back stock to keep the price up. It's simple really and it only has to work for a few years, until the contract is completed and the shares vest.
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Mar 9, 2024 03:13
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Nah, there's legit reasons for it too. Most people aren't made to sit in a room working for 8 hours straight every day; they need to socialize, and I mean engaging in actual communal behaviors, not just hitting the pub with friends every other weekend. Motivation is a factor. Some people like being able to show off their work in person, or getting an actual pat on the back rather than a like on your slack message. Online work is convenient, but pretty dehumanizing.
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Mar 9, 2024 03:26
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thotsky posted:Nah, there's legit reasons for it too. Most people aren't made to sit in a room working for 8 hours straight every day; they need to socialize, and I mean engaging in actual communal behaviors, not just hitting the pub with friends every other weekend. Nobody is made to sit in a room working for 8 hours straight. This is why working from home is so much beneficial to everyone. You actually get to see people you care about and your pets (if you have any), which are the creatures that love you the most in the world. Rather than the ghouls at the office. 99% of which you don't even know the name of, nor do you care to.And you can go outside whenever you want (when other people aren't) see the sun, a forest (or just a tree), and re-energize. thotsky posted:Motivation is a factor. Some people like being able to show off their work in person, or getting an actual pat on the back rather than a like on your slack message. Online work is convenient, but pretty dehumanizing. If the work you need to show off requires "in person" (I'm thinking robots or some other machinery) then there's no problem in organizing such events. Work-related social events are not prohibited by a work from home policy. Online work is not only convenient, but the most humanizing, as it values the most of a person's time than any other option. And "time" is the most precious currency we have, as is extremely limited as it is. edit: I'm joking about the "ghouls" part. They're human. Mostly. I think. Not 100% on that though. Volguus fucked around with this message at 03:53 on Mar 9, 2024 |
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Mar 9, 2024 03:46
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I generally agree with Thotsky on this. Like if you can make WFH work for you kudos, but so many of the explanations sound like this:Volguus posted:Rather than the ghouls at the office. 99% of which you don't even know the name of, nor do you care to. Like yeah you said it's a joke but... Is it? This attitude is everywhere in WFH stuff and I think it's a pretty lovely take that reflects a deeply lovely view towards coworkers.
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Mar 9, 2024 04:39
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Just need to come to terms with the fact that 99.9% of our jobs do nothing for ourselves or society and are ultimately wasted time and resources to enrich a handful of individuals at the top. If we had jobs with actual meaning behind them, the calculus would be different. But in this current environment? I will take the WFH everytime so I can check the box and pay the landlord with the least damage to my mind body and soul.
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Mar 9, 2024 04:53
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Falcon2001 posted:I generally agree with Thotsky on this. Like if you can make WFH work for you kudos, but so many of the explanations sound like this: As in? I'd be a bit curious to find out the reason you think that way. We're coworkers, not friends. We try to get along, to help each other achieve the common goal (whatever that is), but it is nothing more than that. Yes, I have made friends, decades long friends, at work. Just visited one last Blizzcon, he works at Blizzard now, know him since 1999. But that's the exception and definitely not the rule. Want to get out and have a beer? By all means, nothing is stopping you. But forcing that interaction on people? That's just loving evil. And they know it. As I said earlier: CEOs do have their motives. None of them involve productivity, employee happiness, or the well being of the company long term. They are actual ghouls, devoid of any humanity, if they even had any to begin with.
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Mar 9, 2024 05:15
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