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My work is all meetings all the time, now. I’m on the phone most of the day. Little things that used to take 20 minutes now take an hour. I used to enjoy workin

My work is all meetings all the time, now. I’m on the phone most of the day. Little things that used to take 20 minutes now take an hour. I used to enjoy working from home a couple days a week because I got some peace and quiet and knew I could catch back up with people when I returned to the office. I went from loving to hating my job in the last three weeks. I am also constantly distracted by having the kids around and, you know, the end of the world. It’s not the isolation I mind it’s having to still work with others under these conditions. I think you have to have a very particular set of circumstances to enjoy wfh under these conditions and I doubt half of Americans have them. I suspect they just have a lot of free time around the house “working” and their jobs could largely be replaced with automation in the near future, but maybe that’s just a bit of jealousy on my part.

gspr 7y ago
Re the last parts: I sure hope you're right, but I think we're both a bit jealous and/or afraid that it is we who are ill-suited for a coming WFH future :-/
- vsareto 7y ago
  If you could magically remove commutes or make it automated, I'd still be on-board with working in office. The only good commutes are near empty roads with nice scenery while I enjoy morning coffee and listen to the news. Many people had to get used to long commutes in terrible traffic after all. Hopefully the answer is that we all just gravitate towards companies that prefer one culture over another.
  - _curious_ 7y ago
    Perhaps the future will be a mix...downsized offices that can accommodate a max % of company-wide employees at once? 50%? A place where the CEO/csuite/salespeople can have meetings and others can really come and go as needed. If I recall, WeWork was getting into this market/model whereas they'd sublease space for a smaller number of companies, sometimes even just one enterprise.
chapium 7y ago
Work from home does work better when you have daycare. The isolation of wfh gave me a lot of anxiety (other life problems factored in as well). I think a good balance is 1-2 days/wfh. Wfh degrades into work from coffeeshop. If your meetings aren't productive there's definitely a problem in your org. I suspect meetings are being driven by those without a clear goal and intend to fill a whole hour talking. Just a hunch, thats some good ole internet armchair analysis for ya. Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho.
- _curious_ 7y ago
  "Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho." Yes and a sympton of mgmnt/people(s) with too much time on their hands...and excess time manifests differently for some under WFH. They can't command and control as easily under WFH so what do?
  - topkai22 7y ago
    In always say it depends on the meeting. I have a lot of meetings that are really working sessions, were we are constantly communicating and co-building. Those can take hours. That being said, there are generally bo more than 5 people on those types of menus
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  It's impossible to extrapolate what is best for everyone. Working from home is a great thing for me especially if they set core hours where everyone should be available for 4 to 5 hours a day. Trying to track down Morning Bob and Nighttime Nancy is a drag for us people who like 10am-6pm days :)
danielrpa 7y ago
I think that you are just generalizing something that can't be easily generalized. I'm not happy with what's happening in the world - as I hope most aren't - but the work from home situation isn't a problem for me. I'm loving it. I have an older kid and both him and my wife, who's a stay-at-home mom, are doing a great job maintaining a quiet environment in the house. One thing that makes a huge difference is having a dedicated room for work. I'm fortunate to be able to afford an extra room just for myself and I set up a mini office in there. It's so much better than an open office environment, I can't even compare. I really get "in the zone" there and instead of getting interrupted every minute in my sad FAANG open office environment, I can actually get stuff done.
- Lambdanaut 7y ago
  I'll chime in there. Same experience. I've got a nice office upstairs away from everyone. I do two things every single day, all day, in that room by myself, and it feels amazing. I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day. Then before bed I catch up with my wife for a couple hours and we watch something. I'm in heaven. Introvert heaven. Communal offices drain my life.
  - gspr 7y ago
    When all of this is over, I hope that work cultures will have more space and acceptance for both our personality types. (Although the pessimist in me just sees those of us who need the social interactions forced to WFH as managers notice the cost saving potential, while those who like the peace and quiet of WFH are forced to go to the office as managers notice the overall drop of productivity… but this is why you shouldn't listen to me for too long ;-))
  - SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
    > I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day. That does sound like introvert heaven. Your company doesn't hold you accountable to your hours? If I could put in a solid 4 hours of work I would get just as much done as I do in 8, and then have extra time for myself and not the mental anguish of trying and failing to focus that whole time.
_curious_ 7y ago
Jealous of what - that they will soon be out of a job?
- flatline 7y ago
  Right - it is not a rational response to the situation on my part, and this will be the natural consequence for many I’m afraid. The American workforce in particular will never be the same.
  - _curious_ 6y ago
    People use a lot of words rooted in negative energy and emotion....like "afraid". What, may I ask do you fear?
BigJono 7y ago
The problem is 100% with the way software is developed these days. Every company trains their staff to be as unproductive as possible with open plan offices, all the productivity is coming from quantity over quality, with every hire and every hour of training reflecting that. Working from home is great if you have autonomy and can build a chunk of software with minimal oversight. But if your dev process revolves solely around collaboration in an open plan office then it's not going to translate well to WFH at all. You simply can't have 3 non-tech people for every dev that all need to be kept in the loop and are continuously making decisions when you're not physically there to keep the conversation grounded. Every big business job I've had has tons of these people that go out of their way to keep everything from the devs until the very last moment because "they're too busy" (with the last huge chunk of pointless work their decisions generated that could have been prevented with a 20 second conversation instead of 18 hours of bikeshedding meetings). And devs are as guilty of this as everyone else. Right now things like code reviews and unit tests are the shit hot trend. "Agile" and "scrum" and whatever else are also red hot. The combination of both means the "default" way to build software is to break everything down into chunks that take hours, and run all the trendy processes on that time scale. If you're breaking every 45 minutes to do a code review, you're going to lose a huge part of the benefit of WFH, whereas in a hotdesking office environment you probably weren't going to build much momentum anyway so it's a much smaller sacrifice. The reason people are losing so much productivity is because before they probably palmed those tasks off to their in-office days so the 1 or 2 WFH days a week were highly productive (at least I know mine were). With 5 WFH days a week that's not an option. The way to run a dev team remote is to give people more autonomy and bigger chunks of work, and tear down communication channels. Start measuring in weeks or months, let the engineers make the decisions and use their judgement on when to loop someone into a conversation. Teams need to be smaller, with 2/3rds devs and roles like product owner and BA providing support, instead of running the show. These roles need to be domain experts with a thorough understanding of what the business requires and an understanding of how software can meet that need. They should be a fountain of knowledge for the devs to access at their own pace, not just mindless machines that shit out JIRA cards with too much boilerplate. And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset, and focus their tech capabilities more on the fundamentals (quality code that produces for the business), and less on setting up elaborate structures that require constant upkeep and communication within the team (huge test suites, elaborate cross-project CI/CD setups, ridiculous webpack configs, constant code reviews, endless NPM dependencies and convoluted patterns that restrict creativity and increase mental load). If you want to be productive from home, you need to create an environment where you can just sit down for a few hours, get in the rythym, and produce quality software. If I think of any great software from the past, or the engineers that produced it, none of them were doing it in anything that looked remotely like the dev environments we have today. Shit, most of them did it from home, or from offices that were so cozy and personal they may as well have been home. I think we've spent the last decade trying to distill software development down into some finely tuned machine that any old cog can drive, and counterintuitively, the further it goes the shittier the software becomes. When I flip through older books like Peopleware, it makes me cringe at how many of the lessons in there still aren't followed, and the amount of problems that were pointed out in the 80s and 90s that aren't only unresolved today, but have seen negative progress. I see covid-19 as a chance to try something different. Most companies are going to continue to make the same mistakes, and mass WFH will never see adoption as long as they do. So you can pretty much put that dream to rest. But I'm going to be working from home a lot in the future, and try doing things another way for a change.
dagmx 7y ago
Conversely for me, meetings have reduced because more people are using slack and email to communicate more frequently, and the quality of their communications has gone up. While i know that sounds like hell for some people, it’s where I thrive since I’ve always worked at multi site companies before, and it was the only effective way to scale communication. So I’ve gone from having meetings all day, every day, to having half that amount. When we do have meetings, I’m also able to attend without having to do as many context switches as before. I’m not having to leave my desk, put down my work and move somewhere else. I can work through the meeting without distracting anyone else. I’d say my productivity is at least 2-3x what it was before this. At the same time, I’ll also fully admit that this is entirely subjective to myself and everyone has different ways of working. I thrive with lots of simultaneous communication and parallel tasks, so having everyone talking in slack and email and meetings at once is my ideal situation because the information now actively makes it way to me, and my time spent having to wrangle things is very much reduced.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Yeah, I'm hardly ever in a meeting where all participants would be in the same room unless it's a special circumstance like an on-site get together or a small meeting with people who just happen to be in the same location. Even if all of us came into an office--which many of us don't either formally or informally--we'd still be on conference/video calls. In some ways, the current situation actually works better because you don't have the mix of physically present people in conference room(s) and people by themselves remotely. (Before this whole thing happened some of the teams I work with already had rules to the effect that if some people were going to be on a remote video link, everyone called in that way.) ADDED: I suspect a lot of people on this board work for small companies with co-located teams in a single location. You get up to companies of even modest size and you end up with people spread over continents and, for many of us, the daily reality is coordinating and having discussions across those continents.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

gspr 7y ago

Re the last parts: I sure hope you're right, but I think we're both a bit jealous and/or afraid that it is we who are ill-suited for a coming WFH future :-/

vsareto 7y ago
If you could magically remove commutes or make it automated, I'd still be on-board with working in office. The only good commutes are near empty roads with nice scenery while I enjoy morning coffee and listen to the news. Many people had to get used to long commutes in terrible traffic after all. Hopefully the answer is that we all just gravitate towards companies that prefer one culture over another.
- _curious_ 7y ago
  Perhaps the future will be a mix...downsized offices that can accommodate a max % of company-wide employees at once? 50%? A place where the CEO/csuite/salespeople can have meetings and others can really come and go as needed. If I recall, WeWork was getting into this market/model whereas they'd sublease space for a smaller number of companies, sometimes even just one enterprise.

chapium 7y ago

Work from home does work better when you have daycare. The isolation of wfh gave me a lot of anxiety (other life problems factored in as well). I think a good balance is 1-2 days/wfh. Wfh degrades into work from coffeeshop. If your meetings aren't productive there's definitely a problem in your org. I suspect meetings are being driven by those without a clear goal and intend to fill a whole hour talking. Just a hunch, thats some good ole internet armchair analysis for ya. Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho.

_curious_ 7y ago
"Long meetings are a symptom of a lack of planning imho." Yes and a sympton of mgmnt/people(s) with too much time on their hands...and excess time manifests differently for some under WFH. They can't command and control as easily under WFH so what do?
- topkai22 7y ago
  In always say it depends on the meeting. I have a lot of meetings that are really working sessions, were we are constantly communicating and co-building. Those can take hours. That being said, there are generally bo more than 5 people on those types of menus
stjohnswarts 6y ago
It's impossible to extrapolate what is best for everyone. Working from home is a great thing for me especially if they set core hours where everyone should be available for 4 to 5 hours a day. Trying to track down Morning Bob and Nighttime Nancy is a drag for us people who like 10am-6pm days :)

danielrpa 7y ago

I think that you are just generalizing something that can't be easily generalized. I'm not happy with what's happening in the world - as I hope most aren't - but the work from home situation isn't a problem for me. I'm loving it. I have an older kid and both him and my wife, who's a stay-at-home mom, are doing a great job maintaining a quiet environment in the house. One thing that makes a huge difference is having a dedicated room for work. I'm fortunate to be able to afford an extra room just for myself and I set up a mini office in there. It's so much better than an open office environment, I can't even compare. I really get "in the zone" there and instead of getting interrupted every minute in my sad FAANG open office environment, I can actually get stuff done.

Lambdanaut 7y ago
I'll chime in there. Same experience. I've got a nice office upstairs away from everyone. I do two things every single day, all day, in that room by myself, and it feels amazing. I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day. Then before bed I catch up with my wife for a couple hours and we watch something. I'm in heaven. Introvert heaven. Communal offices drain my life.
- gspr 7y ago
  When all of this is over, I hope that work cultures will have more space and acceptance for both our personality types. (Although the pessimist in me just sees those of us who need the social interactions forced to WFH as managers notice the cost saving potential, while those who like the peace and quiet of WFH are forced to go to the office as managers notice the overall drop of productivity… but this is why you shouldn't listen to me for too long ;-))
- SketchySeaBeast 7y ago
  > I do my work for a few hours, and then I hack on a personal project the rest of the day. That does sound like introvert heaven. Your company doesn't hold you accountable to your hours? If I could put in a solid 4 hours of work I would get just as much done as I do in 8, and then have extra time for myself and not the mental anguish of trying and failing to focus that whole time.

_curious_ 7y ago

Jealous of what - that they will soon be out of a job?

flatline 7y ago
Right - it is not a rational response to the situation on my part, and this will be the natural consequence for many I’m afraid. The American workforce in particular will never be the same.
- _curious_ 6y ago
  People use a lot of words rooted in negative energy and emotion....like "afraid". What, may I ask do you fear?

BigJono 7y ago

The problem is 100% with the way software is developed these days. Every company trains their staff to be as unproductive as possible with open plan offices, all the productivity is coming from quantity over quality, with every hire and every hour of training reflecting that. Working from home is great if you have autonomy and can build a chunk of software with minimal oversight. But if your dev process revolves solely around collaboration in an open plan office then it's not going to translate well to WFH at all. You simply can't have 3 non-tech people for every dev that all need to be kept in the loop and are continuously making decisions when you're not physically there to keep the conversation grounded. Every big business job I've had has tons of these people that go out of their way to keep everything from the devs until the very last moment because "they're too busy" (with the last huge chunk of pointless work their decisions generated that could have been prevented with a 20 second conversation instead of 18 hours of bikeshedding meetings). And devs are as guilty of this as everyone else. Right now things like code reviews and unit tests are the shit hot trend. "Agile" and "scrum" and whatever else are also red hot. The combination of both means the "default" way to build software is to break everything down into chunks that take hours, and run all the trendy processes on that time scale. If you're breaking every 45 minutes to do a code review, you're going to lose a huge part of the benefit of WFH, whereas in a hotdesking office environment you probably weren't going to build much momentum anyway so it's a much smaller sacrifice. The reason people are losing so much productivity is because before they probably palmed those tasks off to their in-office days so the 1 or 2 WFH days a week were highly productive (at least I know mine were). With 5 WFH days a week that's not an option. The way to run a dev team remote is to give people more autonomy and bigger chunks of work, and tear down communication channels. Start measuring in weeks or months, let the engineers make the decisions and use their judgement on when to loop someone into a conversation. Teams need to be smaller, with 2/3rds devs and roles like product owner and BA providing support, instead of running the show. These roles need to be domain experts with a thorough understanding of what the business requires and an understanding of how software can meet that need. They should be a fountain of knowledge for the devs to access at their own pace, not just mindless machines that shit out JIRA cards with too much boilerplate. And devs need to take on more responsibility, broaden their non-technical skillset, and focus their tech capabilities more on the fundamentals (quality code that produces for the business), and less on setting up elaborate structures that require constant upkeep and communication within the team (huge test suites, elaborate cross-project CI/CD setups, ridiculous webpack configs, constant code reviews, endless NPM dependencies and convoluted patterns that restrict creativity and increase mental load). If you want to be productive from home, you need to create an environment where you can just sit down for a few hours, get in the rythym, and produce quality software. If I think of any great software from the past, or the engineers that produced it, none of them were doing it in anything that looked remotely like the dev environments we have today. Shit, most of them did it from home, or from offices that were so cozy and personal they may as well have been home. I think we've spent the last decade trying to distill software development down into some finely tuned machine that any old cog can drive, and counterintuitively, the further it goes the shittier the software becomes. When I flip through older books like Peopleware, it makes me cringe at how many of the lessons in there still aren't followed, and the amount of problems that were pointed out in the 80s and 90s that aren't only unresolved today, but have seen negative progress. I see covid-19 as a chance to try something different. Most companies are going to continue to make the same mistakes, and mass WFH will never see adoption as long as they do. So you can pretty much put that dream to rest. But I'm going to be working from home a lot in the future, and try doing things another way for a change.

dagmx 7y ago

Conversely for me, meetings have reduced because more people are using slack and email to communicate more frequently, and the quality of their communications has gone up. While i know that sounds like hell for some people, it’s where I thrive since I’ve always worked at multi site companies before, and it was the only effective way to scale communication. So I’ve gone from having meetings all day, every day, to having half that amount. When we do have meetings, I’m also able to attend without having to do as many context switches as before. I’m not having to leave my desk, put down my work and move somewhere else. I can work through the meeting without distracting anyone else. I’d say my productivity is at least 2-3x what it was before this. At the same time, I’ll also fully admit that this is entirely subjective to myself and everyone has different ways of working. I thrive with lots of simultaneous communication and parallel tasks, so having everyone talking in slack and email and meetings at once is my ideal situation because the information now actively makes it way to me, and my time spent having to wrangle things is very much reduced.

ghaff 6y ago
Yeah, I'm hardly ever in a meeting where all participants would be in the same room unless it's a special circumstance like an on-site get together or a small meeting with people who just happen to be in the same location. Even if all of us came into an office--which many of us don't either formally or informally--we'd still be on conference/video calls. In some ways, the current situation actually works better because you don't have the mix of physically present people in conference room(s) and people by themselves remotely. (Before this whole thing happened some of the teams I work with already had rules to the effect that if some people were going to be on a remote video link, everyone called in that way.) ADDED: I suspect a lot of people on this board work for small companies with co-located teams in a single location. You get up to companies of even modest size and you end up with people spread over continents and, for many of us, the daily reality is coordinating and having discussions across those continents.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]