12 ms·

Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it's a great space. There's a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the res

Had a party at the WordPress office a few years back and it's a great space. There's a lounge, kitchen, the bathrooms are nice, some room for bikes, and the rest of the space is setup to be multi-use. There's a big stage area and the corners are furnished to be pretty cozy. Of my past work places--death star cube farms in old silicon valley to tiny rooms in sweltering Berkeley summers to shiny live/work lofts to giant sprawling disneyland like campus to noisy hipster coffee shops--that WordPress office would be up there in terms of a good place to work at. The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up. I've been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM. I've built my lifestyle around that. As in I work around my life. Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore. Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000's, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010's with streaming Netflix. And as one disappear, so does another and another. When you look around and realize no one else is there anymore it just becomes a ghost town while the virtual water cooler becomes more and more vibrant. No ones goes to the office anymore, it's too lonely.

devoply 9y ago
> if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. Employers have been eating up to 10 hours (2 hours per day) of unpaid commute time of employees for ages. Is it then really surprising that no one wants to waste time coming to work. If that time was paid, if commute time was paid, then maybe you would consider it. But it's a very simple economic calculation. It's like why am I paying for that time. I don't have to, so I won't. That 10 hours is 20% extra salary that is not paid. And if your argument is that you could live closer, then the counter argument is that employers should have their offices in affordable areas where any employee can afford to easily live because rent is cheap. Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect.
- del82 9y ago
  It's interesting to view commute time as the employer's time rather than employee's time, and therefore as time that should be compensated. I'd always thought of it as the employee's time, and the employee's decision about where to live and how to commute, etc. As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job. Playing with this idea a bit: do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?
  - devoply 9y ago
    Everyone has to eat at all times regardless. Everyone has to wear clothes. I bought steel toed boots that I only needed for work, company had a $150 allowance for that.
  - wickawic 9y ago
    Many workplaces require a certain attire. You probably already own dress clothes, but someone who doesn't might have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to obtain clothes for their job. But I'm not just talking about just white collar positions either; construction workers, photographers, waiters, retail workers, telemarketers, etc. all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables". If I can expense my ergonomic keyboard, a dock worker better be able to expense their steel-toed boots.
    - wolfgke 9y ago
      > all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables". In Germany if some safety clothes are compulsory by law, the employer has to pay for them: http://www.business-netz.com/Arbeitsschutz-und-Arbeitssicherheit/Arbeitskleidung-Arbeitgeber http://www.business-netz.com/Arbeitsschutz-und-Arbeitssicher...
  - firasd 9y ago
    Interesting related court case from a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_Inc._v._Busk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...: "a unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court, ruling that time spent by workers waiting to undergo anti-employee theft security screenings is not "integral and indispensable" to their work, and thus not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Court delivered their ruling on December 9, 2014." I found this because I had a vague memory about a case about time spent "closing down stores" but maybe it was this or something else.
- alaskamiller 9y ago
  Everything in the valley back in the day was 15 min away. Now that same 15 min takes 1.5 hrs. Because everyone's now here. Who pays for that? You can move Google out of Mountain View to Bumfuck, Idaho. Then you lose the centralization and plugging into the network. Who pays for that? But to be honest, most prefer it this way. This crazy doo-dad lifestyle of fighting that 3 hour traffic. Because the thing is, if you work hard to win (or more likely you're just fortunate enough to win), then you get to enjoy central networking, get to enjoy the year over year growth of your property, get to enjoy the convenience of job hopping, get to enjoy that the smartest and the brightest all want in on this action. So I don't know. I paid for my own uniforms in the marine corps. Someone should be sending me checks!
  - devoply 9y ago
    Well the company gets to enjoy having employees, because they tolerate them working from home. They get to make all the sweet sweet profit. They see their revenues increase, etc. Your whole perspective can be framed the exact other way as well. At the end it's a negotiation. Who wins that is a matter of perspective. It's a privilege to have talented employees just as it's a privilege to work for a good company.
    - alaskamiller 9y ago
      Right. And every time one hits up hackerne.ws it's wage theft as well. Cuts both ways.
      - croon 9y ago
        I'm doing that in the office right now, has nothing to do with location. Measure productivity, don't police time. If you as an employer are getting less results from telecommuting (while also not being able to attract better talent, which you should) then of course it's a loss, but I would like to see those numbers. I for one produce better results at home, even if I were to spend 2 hours on hn.
      - angersock 9y ago
- jlebrech 9y ago
  who pays employees commute time? is this an american thing?
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    Employees eat commute time, at least in most white collar salary positions in the US.
  - 24gttghh 9y ago
    What's interesting is that we can get paid for travel to other customer sites of our employers when using personal vehicles (up to $.535/mile per IRS guidelines[0]), but not to go to our actual workplaces. [0]https://www.irs.gov/uac/2017-standard-mileage-rates-for-business-and-medical-and-moving-announced https://www.irs.gov/uac/2017-standard-mileage-rates-for-busi...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - carrja99 9y ago
    If you have a home office and commute to a client site you can claim it as a deduction at tax time. Outside of that I do know of some employers who do reimburse mileage as long as it is filed and more than 20 miles but that is rare.
- koolba 9y ago
  If commute time was paid you'd be incentivizing people to live further from work. The onus is on the employee to optimizing getting to point X by time Y. Whether that means living closer or leaving earlier, they make that call.
  - humanrebar 9y ago
    In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay? I suspect if commute time was indistinguishable from work time as far as pay goes, employers would still want to encourage employees to live closer to work in various ways.
    - koolba 9y ago
      I've seen it first hand. At one large financial services company employees who came in early (before 7am) or stayed late (after 9pm) had access to free black cars for commuting. That had a direct impact on at least one person I know's decision to move further from the office.
      - sidlls 9y ago
        This sounds like the old conservative canard about some folks not wanting to earn more income because it will put them in the next tax bracket.
    - restalis 9y ago
      "In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay?" Look at it in another way -- you're basically penalizing the employees that don't spend time commuting by paying them less money. In practice I've seen this kind of phenomenon with smoking. Many years ago, in the army, the smokers got smoking breaks whereas the non-smokers did not. Soon almost all soldiers were smokers!
      - ryandrake 9y ago
        I knew a guy a long time ago who pretended to be a smoker so he could get periodic "smoke breaks" from the office.
- revelation 9y ago
  Well if your goal here is to make sure people continue to waste 2 hours of their day on commuting then look no further than making that time paid. It's a perverse incentive for the whole destructive car lifestyle that has you sitting utterly depressed in some metal death box surrounded by millions of your peers in more death boxes as you slowly trample through cities (picking up a few of the locals on the way and leaving them dead by the roadside) to your job.
- marcosdumay 9y ago
  > Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect. Clients expecting you to be there is a perfectly valid reason. Peers isn't.
- s73ver 9y ago
  Those places that are affordable are affordable because not many people want to live there. Those places where people do want to live are quickly becoming less affordable.
likelynew 9y ago
> Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore. Curious what you meant here.
- pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
  no one knows that he doesn't do anything anymore.
- eddieroger 9y ago
  As was I. The direct measure of productivity is, and should be, successful work completed. It's a pretty easy measure, actually - is stuff getting done in the time expected.
michaelbuckbee 9y ago
Not entirely sure I caught your thought about "..direct measure of productivity." Butts in seats is an indirect measure of productivity. I find that (typically) being remote forces you to make tangible, valuable progress as there is no room to hide behind "showed up on time, sat in a bunch of meetings." There will never be a perfect system for all people in all roles, so YMMV.
andygcook 9y ago
I don't think this is WordPress employees taking a mile when given an inch by working remotely all the time. I believe WordPress encourages employees not to regularly go to the office. The reason being is they don't want a small faction of the company to become essentially collocated while the rest of the company is distributed, thus breaking their communication flows. Remote works for WordPress because almost all communication gets archived in Slack, email or p2 (their internal social network built on WordPress). Anyone can see what's going on or get caught up asynchronously. It's pretty much guaranteed that in a collocated environment some of that communication would happen offline IRL, and others would miss out on it.
- larrik 9y ago
  "archived in Slack" Wait, is there a way to make old conversations in Slack less painful to find and read? Anything more than 3 pages away is just not worth the effort for me.
  - rmccue 9y ago
    http://slackarchive.io/ http://slackarchive.io/ is neat, you might be able to get utility out of that, depending on what you're doing.
  - tspike 9y ago
    Search
    - larrik 9y ago
      Searching in the app is brutal, and if you are having a conversation in the same channel, it's basically worthless.
      - tspike 9y ago
        Have you tried in:<channel> <search query>? Seems to work ok for me. Similarly, using from:<user> <search query> is useful.
bluedino 9y ago
>> Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000's, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010's with streaming Netflix. Remote or not, it can be very difficult to get things done when you're waiting on input (or output) from a co-worker who's not on the same schedule as the rest of the team. There are some tasks where you can work on blocks of time at any an hour of the day, but there are also tasks and time you need to be available (whether it's voice, chat, video) and responsive.
- restalis 9y ago
  "it can be very difficult to get things done when you're waiting on input (or output) from a co-worker who's not on the same schedule as the rest of the team" That sounds to me more like a poor problem deconstruction and task distribution. For problem deconstruction though, I agree that team discussion might be desirable, thus -- availability requirement.
Androider 9y ago
> Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore. Happy customers, products shipped, features delivered per team, bugs fixed, documentation written, individual git commits, are all direct measures of productivity that the good companies and managers track. Time spent in the office, visibility, and even overall time spent working etc. are poor indirect measures that doesn't require any skill from the manager.
- gedrap 9y ago
  Even the 'good' metrics you listed are not that good and can be easily gamed if they are important enough, e.g. can influence salary, etc. Happy customers is the only exception, but it's essentially impossible to attribute this to a team or an individual and is more of a company's health metric. You could just replace it with revenue. >>> products shipped, features delivered per team Will lead to releasing products that should never be released, or releasing too early, or creating a lot of features just to increase the counter. >>> bugs fixed Then why ship quality product in the first place, if it is more valuable to have easy bugs to fix later? >>> documentation written Can result in poorly written, or way too detailed documentation which will go out of date the next day. >>> individual git commits Some people commit more than a dozen of times a day and happily push them. Or you can create tons of commits that deliver very little value (e.g. adds a single comment), but increases the counter. I understand that it is all well intended, it just seems like it creates a game rather than solves a problem. Some people are great at adapting to games and rules, some people - not so much. Quantifying developer's work has been discussed a lot, and I am still largely skeptical about such low level metrics. Essentially, it motivates people to maximize the score, even if it means doing things that are only good for the score, instead of good for the company.
  - fao_ 9y ago
    But all of that assumes that you're just plotting it on a graph and checking how it looks. Humans are capable of doing more assessment than that. Really a manager should do at least some cursory checks of documentation, etc. to ensure that it's not poorly written, etc.
  - 9y ago
Overtonwindow 9y ago
After working from home most of my career, I wish I had an office to go to. I find it very lonely at home.
- datamingle 9y ago
  There are coworking spaces you can rent with fellow telecommuters in most cities and of course coffee shops as well.
  - cnp 9y ago
    Yeah, getting a co-working space was the best $350 / month i've spent. Effectively solved all of my complaints, met new friends, and could nap at the desk when needed ;)
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      $350/mo?? How much would the gas cost for you to commute to your physical office (assuming you have one)? Are you really coming out ahead compared to commuting to an office?
      - mahyarm 9y ago
        How much would the equivalent office space cost for the employer?
    - Overtonwindow 9y ago
      I've heard of these but it's been tough to justify the costs. Coffee shops are good, but they're usually crowded with awful internet. I'm finding some success with the library. I found a big one that has lots of people working away. I went today and got a lot of work done and felt wonderful, so maybe the public library is my new co-working space :)
pavel_lishin 9y ago
> The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up. Isn't that the employer offering a foot, and the employees gladly taking them up on the offer, to the mutual benefit of both? It's not like they're helping themselves to a pocketful of pens and a spare monitor on their way home. > I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM. I'm glad that's working out for you, but the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week.
- flippyhead 9y ago
  > the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week. I totally get this sentiment but for me it's really nice to choose crazy work hours if I want them.
  - pavel_lishin 9y ago
    True; if I didn't have the kid, I would love, love, love to work on a much later shift. At work, I usually don't really feel like I'm ready to dive into something until afternoon; and I've spent many hours coding away on personal projects after the kid goes to sleep at 8.
  - Edd314159 9y ago
    This is important. There's a backlash right now against companies that _demand_ such work hours, which is totally understandable. But - some people _choose_ to work at 2AM. They could be people still working at 2AM after starting at 10AM (I hurt for those people, but to each their own) or they could be people that started work at 9PM after a 6 hour break from working from lunchtime to 3PM. Such is the beauty of the remote-working culture. Working at what some might consider "crazy" or "unhealthy" hours might actually be the result of having a healthy work-life balance, spending the "regular" waking hours with your family and enjoying life.
    - sh87 9y ago
emodendroket 9y ago
> I've been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM. If that's the tradeoff I think I'll keep commuting.

devoply 9y ago

> if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. Employers have been eating up to 10 hours (2 hours per day) of unpaid commute time of employees for ages. Is it then really surprising that no one wants to waste time coming to work. If that time was paid, if commute time was paid, then maybe you would consider it. But it's a very simple economic calculation. It's like why am I paying for that time. I don't have to, so I won't. That 10 hours is 20% extra salary that is not paid. And if your argument is that you could live closer, then the counter argument is that employers should have their offices in affordable areas where any employee can afford to easily live because rent is cheap. Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect.

del82 9y ago
It's interesting to view commute time as the employer's time rather than employee's time, and therefore as time that should be compensated. I'd always thought of it as the employee's time, and the employee's decision about where to live and how to commute, etc. As an employee I'd factor in the commute when making decisions about a job. Playing with this idea a bit: do you view the clothes that someone (only) wears to a traditional in-person office as rightfully the responsibility of the employer? Lunch?
- devoply 9y ago
  Everyone has to eat at all times regardless. Everyone has to wear clothes. I bought steel toed boots that I only needed for work, company had a $150 allowance for that.
- wickawic 9y ago
  Many workplaces require a certain attire. You probably already own dress clothes, but someone who doesn't might have to spend hundreds or thousands of dollars to obtain clothes for their job. But I'm not just talking about just white collar positions either; construction workers, photographers, waiters, retail workers, telemarketers, etc. all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables". If I can expense my ergonomic keyboard, a dock worker better be able to expense their steel-toed boots.
  - wolfgke 9y ago
    > all have dress codes, some for safety and some to weed out "undesirables". In Germany if some safety clothes are compulsory by law, the employer has to pay for them: http://www.business-netz.com/Arbeitsschutz-und-Arbeitssicherheit/Arbeitskleidung-Arbeitgeber http://www.business-netz.com/Arbeitsschutz-und-Arbeitssicher...
- firasd 9y ago
  Interesting related court case from a couple years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_Inc._v._Busk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrity_Staffing_Solutions,_...: "a unanimous decision by the United States Supreme Court, ruling that time spent by workers waiting to undergo anti-employee theft security screenings is not "integral and indispensable" to their work, and thus not compensable under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The Court delivered their ruling on December 9, 2014." I found this because I had a vague memory about a case about time spent "closing down stores" but maybe it was this or something else.
alaskamiller 9y ago
Everything in the valley back in the day was 15 min away. Now that same 15 min takes 1.5 hrs. Because everyone's now here. Who pays for that? You can move Google out of Mountain View to Bumfuck, Idaho. Then you lose the centralization and plugging into the network. Who pays for that? But to be honest, most prefer it this way. This crazy doo-dad lifestyle of fighting that 3 hour traffic. Because the thing is, if you work hard to win (or more likely you're just fortunate enough to win), then you get to enjoy central networking, get to enjoy the year over year growth of your property, get to enjoy the convenience of job hopping, get to enjoy that the smartest and the brightest all want in on this action. So I don't know. I paid for my own uniforms in the marine corps. Someone should be sending me checks!
- devoply 9y ago
  Well the company gets to enjoy having employees, because they tolerate them working from home. They get to make all the sweet sweet profit. They see their revenues increase, etc. Your whole perspective can be framed the exact other way as well. At the end it's a negotiation. Who wins that is a matter of perspective. It's a privilege to have talented employees just as it's a privilege to work for a good company.
  - alaskamiller 9y ago
    Right. And every time one hits up hackerne.ws it's wage theft as well. Cuts both ways.
    - croon 9y ago
      I'm doing that in the office right now, has nothing to do with location. Measure productivity, don't police time. If you as an employer are getting less results from telecommuting (while also not being able to attract better talent, which you should) then of course it's a loss, but I would like to see those numbers. I for one produce better results at home, even if I were to spend 2 hours on hn.
    - angersock 9y ago
jlebrech 9y ago
who pays employees commute time? is this an american thing?
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Employees eat commute time, at least in most white collar salary positions in the US.
- 24gttghh 9y ago
  What's interesting is that we can get paid for travel to other customer sites of our employers when using personal vehicles (up to $.535/mile per IRS guidelines[0]), but not to go to our actual workplaces. [0]https://www.irs.gov/uac/2017-standard-mileage-rates-for-business-and-medical-and-moving-announced https://www.irs.gov/uac/2017-standard-mileage-rates-for-busi...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- carrja99 9y ago
  If you have a home office and commute to a client site you can claim it as a deduction at tax time. Outside of that I do know of some employers who do reimburse mileage as long as it is filed and more than 20 miles but that is rare.
koolba 9y ago
If commute time was paid you'd be incentivizing people to live further from work. The onus is on the employee to optimizing getting to point X by time Y. Whether that means living closer or leaving earlier, they make that call.
- humanrebar 9y ago
  In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay? I suspect if commute time was indistinguishable from work time as far as pay goes, employers would still want to encourage employees to live closer to work in various ways.
  - koolba 9y ago
    I've seen it first hand. At one large financial services company employees who came in early (before 7am) or stayed late (after 9pm) had access to free black cars for commuting. That had a direct impact on at least one person I know's decision to move further from the office.
    - sidlls 9y ago
      This sounds like the old conservative canard about some folks not wanting to earn more income because it will put them in the next tax bracket.
  - restalis 9y ago
    "In theory I agree. In practice, has anyone seen anyone work farther from work on purpose to pad their pay?" Look at it in another way -- you're basically penalizing the employees that don't spend time commuting by paying them less money. In practice I've seen this kind of phenomenon with smoking. Many years ago, in the army, the smokers got smoking breaks whereas the non-smokers did not. Soon almost all soldiers were smokers!
    - ryandrake 9y ago
      I knew a guy a long time ago who pretended to be a smoker so he could get periodic "smoke breaks" from the office.
revelation 9y ago
Well if your goal here is to make sure people continue to waste 2 hours of their day on commuting then look no further than making that time paid. It's a perverse incentive for the whole destructive car lifestyle that has you sitting utterly depressed in some metal death box surrounded by millions of your peers in more death boxes as you slowly trample through cities (picking up a few of the locals on the way and leaving them dead by the roadside) to your job.
marcosdumay 9y ago
> Not in the middle of downtown because that's what their peers or customers expect. Clients expecting you to be there is a perfectly valid reason. Peers isn't.
s73ver 9y ago
Those places that are affordable are affordable because not many people want to live there. Those places where people do want to live are quickly becoming less affordable.

likelynew 9y ago

> Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore. Curious what you meant here.

pg_is_a_butt 9y ago
no one knows that he doesn't do anything anymore.
eddieroger 9y ago
As was I. The direct measure of productivity is, and should be, successful work completed. It's a pretty easy measure, actually - is stuff getting done in the time expected.

michaelbuckbee 9y ago

Not entirely sure I caught your thought about "..direct measure of productivity." Butts in seats is an indirect measure of productivity. I find that (typically) being remote forces you to make tangible, valuable progress as there is no room to hide behind "showed up on time, sat in a bunch of meetings." There will never be a perfect system for all people in all roles, so YMMV.

andygcook 9y ago

I don't think this is WordPress employees taking a mile when given an inch by working remotely all the time. I believe WordPress encourages employees not to regularly go to the office. The reason being is they don't want a small faction of the company to become essentially collocated while the rest of the company is distributed, thus breaking their communication flows. Remote works for WordPress because almost all communication gets archived in Slack, email or p2 (their internal social network built on WordPress). Anyone can see what's going on or get caught up asynchronously. It's pretty much guaranteed that in a collocated environment some of that communication would happen offline IRL, and others would miss out on it.

larrik 9y ago
"archived in Slack" Wait, is there a way to make old conversations in Slack less painful to find and read? Anything more than 3 pages away is just not worth the effort for me.
- rmccue 9y ago
  http://slackarchive.io/ http://slackarchive.io/ is neat, you might be able to get utility out of that, depending on what you're doing.
- tspike 9y ago
  Search
  - larrik 9y ago
    Searching in the app is brutal, and if you are having a conversation in the same channel, it's basically worthless.
    - tspike 9y ago
      Have you tried in:<channel> <search query>? Seems to work ok for me. Similarly, using from:<user> <search query> is useful.

bluedino 9y ago

>> Sitting somewhere from 9 to 5 is like watching TV from the 2000's, ordering Netflix DVDs when we live in the 2010's with streaming Netflix. Remote or not, it can be very difficult to get things done when you're waiting on input (or output) from a co-worker who's not on the same schedule as the rest of the team. There are some tasks where you can work on blocks of time at any an hour of the day, but there are also tasks and time you need to be available (whether it's voice, chat, video) and responsive.

restalis 9y ago
"it can be very difficult to get things done when you're waiting on input (or output) from a co-worker who's not on the same schedule as the rest of the team" That sounds to me more like a poor problem deconstruction and task distribution. For problem deconstruction though, I agree that team discussion might be desirable, thus -- availability requirement.

Androider 9y ago

> Things just... get done without a direct measure of productivity anymore. Happy customers, products shipped, features delivered per team, bugs fixed, documentation written, individual git commits, are all direct measures of productivity that the good companies and managers track. Time spent in the office, visibility, and even overall time spent working etc. are poor indirect measures that doesn't require any skill from the manager.

gedrap 9y ago
Even the 'good' metrics you listed are not that good and can be easily gamed if they are important enough, e.g. can influence salary, etc. Happy customers is the only exception, but it's essentially impossible to attribute this to a team or an individual and is more of a company's health metric. You could just replace it with revenue. >>> products shipped, features delivered per team Will lead to releasing products that should never be released, or releasing too early, or creating a lot of features just to increase the counter. >>> bugs fixed Then why ship quality product in the first place, if it is more valuable to have easy bugs to fix later? >>> documentation written Can result in poorly written, or way too detailed documentation which will go out of date the next day. >>> individual git commits Some people commit more than a dozen of times a day and happily push them. Or you can create tons of commits that deliver very little value (e.g. adds a single comment), but increases the counter. I understand that it is all well intended, it just seems like it creates a game rather than solves a problem. Some people are great at adapting to games and rules, some people - not so much. Quantifying developer's work has been discussed a lot, and I am still largely skeptical about such low level metrics. Essentially, it motivates people to maximize the score, even if it means doing things that are only good for the score, instead of good for the company.
- fao_ 9y ago
  But all of that assumes that you're just plotting it on a graph and checking how it looks. Humans are capable of doing more assessment than that. Really a manager should do at least some cursory checks of documentation, etc. to ensure that it's not poorly written, etc.
- 9y ago

Overtonwindow 9y ago

After working from home most of my career, I wish I had an office to go to. I find it very lonely at home.

datamingle 9y ago
There are coworking spaces you can rent with fellow telecommuters in most cities and of course coffee shops as well.
- cnp 9y ago
  Yeah, getting a co-working space was the best $350 / month i've spent. Effectively solved all of my complaints, met new friends, and could nap at the desk when needed ;)
  - ryandrake 9y ago
    $350/mo?? How much would the gas cost for you to commute to your physical office (assuming you have one)? Are you really coming out ahead compared to commuting to an office?
    - mahyarm 9y ago
      How much would the equivalent office space cost for the employer?
  - Overtonwindow 9y ago
    I've heard of these but it's been tough to justify the costs. Coffee shops are good, but they're usually crowded with awful internet. I'm finding some success with the library. I found a big one that has lots of people working away. I went today and got a lot of work done and felt wonderful, so maybe the public library is my new co-working space :)

pavel_lishin 9y ago

> The real story is the upward trend that if you give an inch, your employees will take a foot. If you offer telecommute, workers will not show up. Isn't that the employer offering a foot, and the employees gladly taking them up on the offer, to the mutual benefit of both? It's not like they're helping themselves to a pocketful of pens and a spare monitor on their way home. > I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM. I'm glad that's working out for you, but the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week.

flippyhead 9y ago
> the only things expecting anything from me at 2am should be my child, and Pagerduty if I'm on-call that week. I totally get this sentiment but for me it's really nice to choose crazy work hours if I want them.
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  True; if I didn't have the kid, I would love, love, love to work on a much later shift. At work, I usually don't really feel like I'm ready to dive into something until afternoon; and I've spent many hours coding away on personal projects after the kid goes to sleep at 8.
- Edd314159 9y ago
  This is important. There's a backlash right now against companies that _demand_ such work hours, which is totally understandable. But - some people _choose_ to work at 2AM. They could be people still working at 2AM after starting at 10AM (I hurt for those people, but to each their own) or they could be people that started work at 9PM after a 6 hour break from working from lunchtime to 3PM. Such is the beauty of the remote-working culture. Working at what some might consider "crazy" or "unhealthy" hours might actually be the result of having a healthy work-life balance, spending the "regular" waking hours with your family and enjoying life.
  - sh87 9y ago

emodendroket 9y ago

> I've been freelancing and telecommuting the past five years. I've built my workstyle around chat bubbles, slack channels, video calls, and emails whether 2PM or 2AM. If that's the tradeoff I think I'll keep commuting.