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raminasi posted:When our overemployed guy got fired we no longer had to clean up the messes his sloppiness caused so it genuinely resulted in less work for us. (I have no idea how they caught him - I didn't snitch or even know, and I doubt anyone else did.) You know, if "less work for us" would translate into "we get to reduce our hours to 30/week with the same pay", then maybe I'd look for more ways to reduce the team's workload. Until then, I'll keep working "8" to "5" and whatever gets done gets done.
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Mar 10, 2024 07:42
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Blinkz0rz posted:To your second point, it's a bit naive to claim that pressure from commercial real estate has no impact on the WFH conversation. They may not be paid by CBRE but you can be drat sure execs are keeping an eye on a huge line-item in their budget, especially if the ~~vibes~~ make it feel like that expense isn't worth it. Is it easier to force their employees back into the office or renegotiate a multi-year lease and incur all the costs associated with moving or downsizing? A lot of the large companies have huge sums of capital tied up in real estate. It's been the safe bet for decades and now it isn't so id be surprised if it's had no effect on the decisions at places like Google and Microsoft to RTO.
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Mar 10, 2024 08:43
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I think companies should have separate in-office / hybrid / remote teams, but I have never seen that anywhere. It always seems like an organization / department wide policy. It shouldn't be so hard to ask somebody what they prefer and put them together with like-minded people.
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Mar 10, 2024 10:36
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M31 posted:It shouldn't be so hard to ask somebody what they prefer and put them together with like-minded people. Heh, this is like the opposite of the typical case of someone saying “this shouldn’t be so hard” to tech.
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Mar 10, 2024 13:16
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I’m transferring within the department so I can actually work with people in my office. Everyone else on my team and partner teams are 90 miles away and it sucks because they constantly leave me out of conversations. My first few weeks I just worked from home because my managers didn’t know who to introduce me to. I ended up meeting people from my home location at that away location for the first time. Of course my manager (who routinely cancels our 1:1s) was distraught and annoyed when I told them I wanted to transfer to co-locate. Even with those handicaps I’m still doing more “visible work” (Slack, filing JIRA tickets, etc) than my team lead, and I imagine that it’s gonna make the team look bad. For my career it makes a ton of sense; even just sitting a few days with that other team I’ve done more mentoring of younger engineers without knowing their work context. So if you have internal mobility options to work with people, I think that’s the best way of making hybrid work for you. Otherwise I’m gonna go crazy working in a billion dollar building and being on zoom and waiting an hour for any Slack response every time because my teammates are likely doing ???? tldr: a lot of the RTO / Hybrid sucks because managers are bad
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Mar 10, 2024 16:36
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Nybble posted:tldr: managers are bad FTFY 
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Mar 10, 2024 16:56
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Replying generally to all of the above, and as anecdotally as the others. Neither WFH nor in office work forces you to be "friends" with your coworkers. If you've worked in an office you know this is a laughable assertion by the types of arguments that come up (temperature/lighting/music being the least troublesome). In office makes it easier to achieve "friendliness" because you're less likely to interrupt someone who is clearly busy; WFH still has a huge mess of competing mechanisms where it's unclear what constitutes an interruption. WFH has empowered increased laziness with technical communication. When a team has at least one person in authority who refuses to use written communication --- ie every team --- wfh becomes call center hell, just waiting for the next "let's have a quick meeting about it!" preventing you from starting focused work. In office those types tend to schedule meetings instead with suitable warning, and historically learned to write poo poo down because they had no expectation of getting quick chat answers when they were sitting in meetings with their bosses and didn't have the answers. In office does require different personal presentation and planning, but I disagree that WFH is a free-form mental vacation: You can't just take a walk because those external activities cause real unexpected delays. In an office "well it's lunchtime don't try to do stuff 5min before lunch" is easy to fix because teams tend to notice who takes off for lunch regularly. More likely with WFH is "well they aren't responding, don't use status settings, they might be walking a dog or themselves or at lunch or gone", so many 1-2hr tasks have become daily-turnarounds. (And, sure, people should "use status and it's all fixed", but the point is that people simply don't). Daily standups solved the issue of proximate teams being so busy that simple tasks would lose priority (did you forget to review my doc?). We don't even need dailies anymore because now everyone expects to need to follow up since schedules are entirely randomized (I'll check back in 24hr if they haven't responded, but not "in the morning" or "after lunch", but wtf some random time for every task and every different person). I've hated WFH since the beginning. It works when you're sick, or if you have a half day medical appointment to focus on, but office productivity is so much greater, better ergonomics, better work setup, presentation screens, white boards. To those who don't want to deal with forced social contracts in offices, I say to you I don't want to bring work into my home, period. It's an invasion having to keep that social masquerade up in my home, to have gear on my table, to mentally loathe that space because of a bad meeting or interchange. Work needs to be "other", way over there in that office, something considered when in that space, restricted to those times.
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Mar 10, 2024 17:29
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:but office productivity is so much greater, better ergonomics, better work setup, presentation screens, white boards this is a post from someone who has never worked at a pre Series A or private equity owned startup  one of the reasons I have declined to RTO here in NYC, in addition to an annoying commute, is that our lovely WeWork is just hotdesks with bad 1080p monitors and terrible Dell keyboards
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Mar 10, 2024 18:54
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Every time I read something like this, I wonder whether everyone else's workplace is weird, or I am just incredibly lucky about the places I work at.PhantomOfTheCopier posted:In office makes it easier to achieve "friendliness" because you're less likely to interrupt someone who is clearly busy; WFH still has a huge mess of competing mechanisms where it's unclear what constitutes an interruption. I can read notification whenever, I can't really ignore someone standing next to my desk. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:WFH has empowered increased laziness with technical communication. When a team has at least one person in authority who refuses to use written communication --- ie every team --- wfh becomes call center hell, just waiting for the next "let's have a quick meeting about it!" preventing you from starting focused work. In office those types tend to schedule meetings instead with suitable warning, and historically learned to write poo poo down because they had no expectation of getting quick chat answers when they were sitting in meetings with their bosses and didn't have the answers. I only have had this happen during my short stint at Microsoft, where the people were fairly open about seeing Covid-induced WFH as temporary, and didn't bother to establish remote-friendly practices. At my current place I have unscheduled call maybe twice a month? And by unscheduled I mean "poo poo be complex, let's have a call after lunch to pair on this", rather than outright call. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:In office does require different personal presentation and planning, but I disagree that WFH is a free-form mental vacation: You can't just take a walk because those external activities cause real unexpected delays. In an office "well it's lunchtime don't try to do stuff 5min before lunch" is easy to fix because teams tend to notice who takes off for lunch regularly. More likely with WFH is "well they aren't responding, don't use status settings, they might be walking a dog or themselves or at lunch or gone", so many 1-2hr tasks have become daily-turnarounds. (And, sure, people should "use status and it's all fixed", but the point is that people simply don't). Daily standups solved the issue of proximate teams being so busy that simple tasks would lose priority (did you forget to review my doc?). We don't even need dailies anymore because now everyone expects to need to follow up since schedules are entirely randomized (I'll check back in 24hr if they haven't responded, but not "in the morning" or "after lunch", but wtf some random time for every task and every different person). Again, what? I just send people a message and let them handle it at their schedule. If you have coworker who regularly ignores messages that came in while they were AFK, the solution is a talk, a pip and a firing if needed.
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Mar 10, 2024 18:54
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also I'm doing some work today so I can take half of Tuesday off to go ride my bike since the weather is miserable this weekend but going to be nice during the week, but this is IC privilege I guess, and one of the reasons I hope to never become a manager
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Mar 10, 2024 18:55
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while i do think that its generally good for human beings to feel like they are being productive and accomplishing things, it may also be a good idea to disentangle your personal happiness and sense of self worth from your job at least to the degree that you aren't minmaxing productivity to a five minute granularity and allowing a meeting to imprint lasting emotional damage onto walls and furniture
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Mar 10, 2024 18:56
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Nybble posted:I’m transferring within the department so I can actually work with people in my office. Everyone else on my team and partner teams are 90 miles away and it sucks because they constantly leave me out of conversations. My first few weeks I just worked from home because my managers didn’t know who to introduce me to. I ended up meeting people from my home location at that away location for the first time. the funny thing is this was my company in 2019 trying to manage having 3 offices across the US, where 80% of a team would be in one office and the other 20% would have a super hard time keeping up because we've gone remote by default, this is no longer an issue, because there is not a single engineering team that is majority in one location
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Mar 10, 2024 19:08
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Fellatio del Toro posted:while i do think that its generally good for human beings to feel like they are being productive and accomplishing things, it may also be a good idea to disentangle your personal happiness and sense of self worth from your job at least to the degree that you aren't minmaxing productivity to a five minute granularity and allowing a meeting to imprint lasting emotional damage onto walls and furniture This is easier for some people than it is for others. Sort of the same way that some people are better at WFH or WFO than others!
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Mar 10, 2024 19:11
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:WFH has empowered increased laziness with technical communication. When a team has at least one person in authority who refuses to use written communication --- ie every team --- wfh becomes call center hell, just waiting for the next "let's have a quick meeting about it!" preventing you from starting focused work. In office those types tend to schedule meetings instead with suitable warning, and historically learned to write poo poo down because they had no expectation of getting quick chat answers when they were sitting in meetings with their bosses and didn't have the answers. There is one guy who cold calls people instead of messaging, and I just reject their call  In the office he would just come and sit on the edge of peoples desks, regardless of what they were doing. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:In office does require different personal presentation and planning, but I disagree that WFH is a free-form mental vacation: You can't just take a walk because those external activities cause real unexpected delays. In an office "well it's lunchtime don't try to do stuff 5min before lunch" is easy to fix because teams tend to notice who takes off for lunch regularly. More likely with WFH is "well they aren't responding, don't use status settings, they might be walking a dog or themselves or at lunch or gone", so many 1-2hr tasks have become daily-turnarounds. (And, sure, people should "use status and it's all fixed", but the point is that people simply don't). Daily standups solved the issue of proximate teams being so busy that simple tasks would lose priority (did you forget to review my doc?). We don't even need dailies anymore because now everyone expects to need to follow up since schedules are entirely randomized (I'll check back in 24hr if they haven't responded, but not "in the morning" or "after lunch", but wtf some random time for every task and every different person). My team know they must set their status when they go to lunch, if they go missing and haven't set their status, they get a telling off. It was solved within the first week of me implementing it. But it sounds like your org has zero structure or discipline and the office 'social' clock helped hide that. PhantomOfTheCopier posted:office productivity is so much greater, better ergonomics, better work setup, presentation screens, white boards I'll need a source on the productivity. As for setup, my home setup is far better than any setup I have ever had at a company. WFH isn't perfect, it has challenges, but all your gripes are fixable. Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 22:06 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 20:32
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Mega Comrade posted:My team know they must set their status when they go to lunch, if they go missing and haven't set their status, they get a telling off. It was solved within the first week of me implementing it.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:35
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I think a few people need to give specifics of their office setup and how many people. Sure I worked at places that were ~10-30 people and you could know where everyone was at, but over that many people it's not feasible to know where everyone is. You are basically stuck with meetings, going to their desk, or asynchronous communication. Which besides "going to their desk" is the same with remote friendly gigs. Also, the status thing sounds exhausting. If Slack says I'm "away" I'm not at my keyboard. For me I'm in real RTO hell. I work for a company that has two offices in the same area (Seattle and Bellevue) with expectations to do one day in each. The great thing about both offices is that it's split over multiple areas, so there's no guarantee you will even see co-workers outside of your team even if they are in the office. So I'll be in meetings where co-workers don't bother meeting together because the burden is too high. I still have co-workers in other offices so all meetings still need to be remote friendly (AKA Zoom/Teams/Meet). I will admit collaborating together face-to-face is better than over some conference software. However, since no one is in one physical location only a handful of people can accomplish that. So it does make some co-workers "higher performing" just because of the collaboration and it's easy to ignore everyone not face-to-face. I'd rather have focused collaboration 1-2 times a year but that costs $$$. The reason to have multiple offices, especially overseas in cheaper economies, is to save the company money even if it makes the work harder.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:02
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Xarn posted:That sounds like hell. gariig posted:Also, the status thing sounds exhausting. If Slack says I'm "away" I'm not at my keyboard. Really? It's 2 clicks once a day so people know you're not gonna be reachable for an extended time. You find that exhausting?
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Mar 10, 2024 22:10
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Mega Comrade posted:Really? It's 2 clicks once a day so people know you're not gonna be reachable for an extended time. You find that exhausting? The concerning part to me isn’t the status setting but the implication that you’re expected to otherwise always respond in less than the length of a walk. No thanks.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:32
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I prefer to just trust people to get their work done rather than micromanaging their away from keyboard time. If you need something so urgently from a coworker that you can't handle an async delay your coworker probably shouldn't be the only person who can answer that question.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:32
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Teams malfunctioned the other day because it had an update that it didn't inform me of and entirely stopped synchronizing messages for almost the whole day, so I didn't see any of them until COB when I finally updated it. I imagine if I were in Mega Comrade's organization I would be fired for that. 
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Mar 11, 2024 00:38
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Yeah Teams Updated and made me reenable my mic/camera etc.. It's also slower than the previous version
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Mar 11, 2024 01:32
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gariig posted:For me I'm in real RTO hell. I work for a company that has two offices in the same area (Seattle and Bellevue) with expectations to do one day in each. The great thing about both offices is that it's split over multiple areas, so there's no guarantee you will even see co-workers outside of your team even if they are in the office. lol what on earth how does someone come up with this
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Mar 11, 2024 03:04
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I sometimes take an hour or two to respond to slack messages even when I'm not afk and it's literally never been an issue because there's no expectation of synchronous communication. If people not being contactable at the drop of a hat means that you're blocked outside of very unusual circumstances then it seems like there's something very incorrect with how you're approaching something.
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Mar 11, 2024 03:46
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Blinkz0rz posted:I prefer to just trust people to get their work done rather than micromanaging their away from keyboard time. Sadly that's exactly why, we have a bunch of legacy and often there's one person who knows why X has broken in prod. I've repeatedly tried to getting knowledge sharing going on but time restraints have limited progress. It's got nothing to do with micromanaging and everything to do with knowing if someone is unreachable for an extended period of time. We have contractural obligations to fix certain things within 4 hours of them being reported, we can't hang about wondering if Ben has just popped to the toilet or is away for lunch. Steve French posted:The concerning part to me isn’t the status setting but the implication that you’re expected to otherwise always respond in less than the length of a walk. How's long is a walk? I sometimes take my dog out for 2 hours during lunch. And no, you only need to respond to something that's urgent. I honestly don't get why you are all so horrified by this tiniest of expectations. Mega Comrade fucked around with this message at 10:08 on Mar 11, 2024 |
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Mar 11, 2024 08:20
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And you're making your broken org my culture problem? :P
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Mar 11, 2024 10:01
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I can't argue that my org isn't broken
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Mar 11, 2024 10:07
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What are your plans for "it is 4 in the morning, the one guy who knows that poo poo is asleep"?
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Mar 11, 2024 10:44
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What are your plans for if that guy gets hit by the truck that is carrying his lottery winnings?
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Mar 11, 2024 10:47
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Xarn posted:What are your plans for "it is 4 in the morning, the one guy who knows that poo poo is asleep"? let him sleep. he'll need it in the morning
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Mar 11, 2024 11:30
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Xarn posted:What are your plans for "it is 4 in the morning, the one guy who knows that poo poo is asleep"? We have more flexibility when it's "out of hours". Most of our customers are the same timezone as us so it's been not too much of an issue. We are currently pushing hard into the US market though and it's for sure going to blow up in our face. Bongo Bill posted:What are your plans for if that guy gets hit by the truck that is carrying his lottery winnings? I would say set the office on fire but that doesn't work with WFH
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Mar 11, 2024 11:47
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Mega Comrade posted:We have more flexibility when it's "out of hours". Most of our customers are the same timezone as us so it's been not too much of an issue. That's fair I guess. I am in place where the engineers are distributed across multiple continents so the idea of distinguishing between someone not responding because they are on lunch, because they are asleep or because they turned off notifications to focus on hard work is not relevant.
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Mar 11, 2024 14:21
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setting a slack status when you're going to be a away for a while is a courtesy, i don't really mind doing it
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Mar 11, 2024 14:49
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Xarn posted:What are your plans for "it is 4 in the morning, the one guy who knows that poo poo is asleep"? One of my favorite Monday mornings was the one where I logged in and found an email, a Slack DM, an @ in a Slack channel, and a Zoom message asking for my help because a server went down Saturday afternoon and nobody knew how to contact me. A coworker from my old department (this was right after a reorg) fortunately stumbled on the correct solution, which was to restart Tomcat. I finally got into the Slack channel after getting caught up on what happened and suggested everybody could have just ignored the problem until Monday. That wasn't a popular suggestion lol
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Mar 11, 2024 15:08
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Mega Comrade posted:I honestly don't get why you are all so horrified by this tiniest of expectations. when you proudly describe yourself as "telling off" people to establish "structure" and "discipline" people will make some assumptions about what kind of middle manager you are
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Mar 11, 2024 15:15
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Fellatio del Toro posted:when you proudly describe yourself as "telling off" people to establish "structure" and "discipline" people will make some assumptions about what kind of middle manager you are 
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Mar 11, 2024 15:48
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Many topics but someone said it well above: Meet people where they're at. Environments, programming languages, procedures, and processes all produce anti-patterns and substandard behaviors naturally because of their flaws. In an office, people naturally feel empowered to walk up to someone's desk. Last week an engineer approached me, stood for 20 seconds before taking a nearby chair, and then sat patiently for another half a minute before I concluded my task and was able to assist them. Someone in authority interrupting almost always has a reason, but if not they would need an adjustment. Remotely, people naturally feel more empowered to have an adhoc full meeting. That is, once they have you responding in chat, they give up and escalate to "needing" a full demonstration. This is a pattern that some have adopted permanently, to the point of announcing it as a viable technique for ongoing project management. To them I say, no, at least 80% should be improved documentation. Demonstrations need to be scheduled so people can prepare any relevant materials and so others can prepare their questions. Otherwise it will mostly be a waste of time. And quite frankly just because I can type in chat does not mean that I'm presentable for a meeting, which would be true if I was working from home or logged in early to deal with an issue. Both environments can be improved, but the types of issues encountered are different.
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Mar 11, 2024 15:53
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Sometimes I'll be in a Zoom call where I didn't expect to have to unmute and say anything and there's a noticeable pause when somebody asks me a question because I have to swing my mic arm around and clear my throat before I can reply. I think that's mostly a factor of the "didn't expect to have to unmute" part of the equation.
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Mar 11, 2024 16:00
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PhantomOfTheCopier posted:In an office, people naturally feel empowered to walk up to someone's desk. Last week an engineer approached me, stood for 20 seconds before taking a nearby chair, and then sat patiently for another half a minute before I concluded my task and was able to assist them. Someone in authority interrupting almost always has a reason, but if not they would need an adjustment. You can't escape these people. They just change tactics with WFH. It's a little easier to silence a call then ignore someone looming over you though.
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Mar 11, 2024 17:03
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prom candy posted:setting a slack status when you're going to be a away for a while is a courtesy, i don't really mind doing it I'm not 15 and work slack isn't ICQ.
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Mar 12, 2024 05:07
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I do go "uh oh" when I get a Slack message though
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Mar 12, 2024 15:52
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