15 ms·

The only reason for me to not go back to the office is: fixed working hours. Sure, my contract says I have to work 40h/week, but I just can't. If I'm at the off

• orwin 6y ago
  Yes, i'm the same. And if you're like me, i suppose sometime, in high pressure situation, you can easily work 10 hours straight. Doing this at the office is impossible, doing this home is easy (if it stay exceptional). I'm more productive home than i was at the office, and this is really surprising for me ( i assumed i was just a slacker).
  • cuddlecake 6y ago
    I've had one of the most productive days yesterday, because my internet went off. Went on a berserk coding spree from 1PM to 1AM with some small breaks in between. Completely cut off from any distraction, I was able to concentrate. Willpower and discipline are nice, but real restrictions that are impossible to circumvent are better, at least for me.
    • alluro2 6y ago
      I'm genuinely curious - would you be so kind to share what kind of coding do you do, and for how long have you been doing it, when you can code for 12 hours not needing to look up how to do something online (syntax, example for a best way to approach something etc)? I'm asking because this is one of my worst fears - how genuine of a senior, experienced developer am I, if I probably wouldn't be able to do 2 good hours of progress without the internet...
      • ghaff 6y ago
        I do a lot more writing than coding. But, while I used to be able to do stuff surrounded by books, absent an Internet connection, I'd have to work through something with lots of [need to check], [flesh this out when can look up], etc. if I tried to do anything in the absence of an Internet connection.
      • minerjoe 6y ago
        > without the internet I've been forced to work without the internet for large swaths of time. In the beginning its a pain, but once you get all the resources you need local, you can speed up past what you can do with the internet. The key, for me, is to work without the internet, keeping a list of things you need and when you hit a hard snag, go online, grab all the things you need, repeat. This allows you to slowly accumuate almost everything you need local. Now you have the ability to full-text index the entire shebang and when you get to the point of real-time responsive full-text search on all your manuals and all the source code (libraries included), you'll be kicking yourself for not getting to that point much sooner. It was truly a game-changer for me. Googling for answers and filtering through the crap is a huge time sink.
      • neverartful 6y ago
        It depends on what it is. If I'm doing something in C, it's much less likely that I use the internet for anything. C and Unix grew up before the internet. Man pages are installed on local system for quick and easy reference. If I'm doing something in a less familiar language, library, or framework (or even new techniques), then I fully expect that I'll rely heavily on internet to find code samples, reference, and documentation.
      • wolco 6y ago
        Practice. Don't look up anything, if you must do it on a phone so you have to manually type anycode you use. It will force you to really learn whatever you are doing.
      • cuddlecake 6y ago
        I'm a software developer of 2.5 years, am developing an Angular SPA since two years. I mainly did refactoring on that day, so I had to make decisions by myself, anyway.
• modzu 6y ago
  then there are those of us with kids and so's around. i can barely get a bloody thing done and for one can't wait to go back!
  • dijit 6y ago
    Not sure why you're being downvoted, being without children (or having a dedicated space outside of the home) is important. Kids don't understand time or space boundaries very well, and will interrupt your focus, your meetings, your work in general. I have a colleague with kids and he was the first to volunteer back to the office.. I am without kids and I never want to go back. This works out decently well, because he's alone: thus, safer than if we all came back. But the issue is if there was more people in the office, then they would make decisions which the rest of us are not privy to.
    • iso947 6y ago
      I have kids at home 5+8), and have no problem with them trying to come in to the study. I’ve worked from home their entire lives though.
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    Looks like nobody else wants to admit that.
  • y2bd 6y ago
    Isn’t this more of an issue of school being out? Would your kids going back to school solve this issue?
  • mac01021 6y ago
    I can't get any work done with my kid around either. But the difference is not that I'm home instead of at the office. The difference is that she's at home instead of at school.
    • jameshart 6y ago
      When kids go back to school some of the work from home conflicts will end, but kids still get home from school early afternoon, and schools typically only open 180 days a year - whereas most officeworking adults have to continue working into the late afternoon, and show up for about 240 days of the year. If you continue working from home after schools reopen, you're still going to have days like these lockdown times...
• birdyrooster 6y ago
  I don’t tell my coworkers when I do this but at Apple we are adults and can go to the bathroom without permission. You can come and go as you wish, that notwithstanding the waste of colocating with and/or commuting to an office. I want virtual reality so I can be in shared spaces for impromptu conversation and coworking. (Edit: I really don’t miss my boomer/genx coworkers jamming out to hair metal)
• mc32 6y ago
  The most productive workers barely scrape 50% productivity; however, idle, chat, socialization and other “wasteful” time isn’t wasted. You learn things about the needs of other groups, colleagues, the politics and all sorts of things you’d never pick up on working remotely.
  • katbyte 6y ago
    I'd rather spend that time on other things tbh
  • danny_sf45 6y ago
    I agree that the socialization part is not actually "wasted" time and I would love to do it as much (or as little) as I want per week (ideally one or two days, instead of five days per week on a forced basis).
  • throwaway894345 6y ago
    I would be very interested to hear more about these claims if you can share a link.
  • zwayhowder 6y ago
    Would love to read any research that backs that number. (I'm not saying you're not right, I just like reading research papers).
    • dijit 6y ago
      This one says we are only productive about 40%, which is in-line with other stuff I've read: https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/new-research-says-workers-are-wasting-60-percent-of-their-time-heres-what-to-do-about-it.html https://www.inc.com/rebecca-hinds/new-research-says-workers-...
      • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
        That's not exactly what the study says. The study claimed that people spend a lot of time doing "work about work", dealing with apps, and so on: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191017005053/en/Asana-Anatomy-Work-Index-Reveals-Employees-Spend https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20191017005053/en/Asa... The time spent on distractions and procrastination was around 1 hour per day: > On average, the research shows that knowledge workers waste one hour and four minutes each day due to distractions and procrastination So to be clear, people were working for more like 80% of their day, but not 100% of that time was considered core work or productive meetings. People don't simply socialize and mess around on the internet for 50% of their work days at most companies. I've been at companies where people get away with that level of messing around, but I wouldn't say it's the norm.
• hesdeadjim 6y ago
  Guess I must be wired differently, but I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?”, rather than “I’m convinced this is the output required of me, thus I will do no more with my new found time.” shrug
  • danny_sf45 6y ago
    Sure, if you can do more go for it. I just can't: my brain is tired, my eyes hurt, I cannot produce any productive output/outcome.
    • hinkley 6y ago
      Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Everything you produce once you are punchy, you will have to re-do tomorrow morning during your productive hours, at which point you have to keep working later to get done what you had planned for today, and now you're in a never-ending loop of reworking your code. It's a milder version of the Red Queen Problem.
  • Aeolun 6y ago
    I think it’s generally more related to a lot of time that’s wasted having ad-hoc conversations with people.
  • antisthenes 6y ago
    > I look at that extra time and think “what more could I do?” If I don't have equity in the company, my interest in that is exactly 0.
• wil421 6y ago
  Someone I heard recently phrased it very well: “I don’t want to spend 2 hours driving a day to do 4 hours of work.”
• mavelikara 6y ago
  > chat with other coworkers (non-work related stuff) > ... > Same outcome (for the company), What if the company cares for those non-work stuff - for example, some of those chats being a mentoring conversation?
  • Koshkin 6y ago
    A mentoring conversation is actually (or should be seen as) work stuff.
    • mavelikara 6y ago
      The company does consider it so; the people involved might not.
• Polylactic_acid 6y ago
  I feel the same. For the last 3 hours of the day I just state at my screen in zombie mode. With wfh when I start to feel braindead I just lay in bed for 15 minutes and when I come back I feel refreshed for the rest of the day. With no pressure to look like you are constantly working you can do what works best since no one can see more than your output at the end of the week.
• hinkley 6y ago
  I have basically stopped eating lunch. I'm not saying that's a good thing (it really isn't, and my QoL improved when I forced myself to take a lunch break every day), but it does change how much time my butt is in the seat between 9 and 5. What I am definitely missing out on is small talk with coworkers. Small talk builds rapport. Rapport de-escalates engineering disputes. I expect a year from now we'll all be complaining about how nasty everybody is when everybody is working remotely.
  • ghaff 6y ago
    When not traveling, I've been remote for quite a while. I do tend to take some sort of mid-day break. But I don't typically do a lot for lunch as a meal. (Unless I occasionally drive out and get takeout and have a lighter dinner.)
    • griffinkelly 6y ago
      One of the biggest QoL improvements for me has been not traveling. I enjoy visiting a new city every once and a while and meeting new people for work, but now in retrospect, my overall work life balance has significantly improved with no business travel.
      • ghaff 6y ago
        Traveling a lot is what I really miss--for all that I complain about it. I was hoping that I could at least do personal travel relatively freely in the fall but that seems a non-starter. I definitely need to figure out a Plan B if, at some point, I can reasonably travel for myself but events are all still shut down.
      • hinkley 6y ago
        If they did a better job of making sure you got a chance to see the city instead of the inside of a hotel, a taxi, a convention center, and office, then I think it would be different. Young people get suckered into it because they don't know yet that they're in for something worse than not going at all; being moment's away and not being able to take advantage of it. My coworker got sent to 'back home' to do an install for a big customer. He was planning to take an extra week to see extended family, and he asked if he should take it before or after the install. I pushed him to do it before, but he opted for after. He spent two weeks sitting in a server room trying to sort out problems and barely saw any family. If he had seen them first, we would have extended his stay to get the customer sorted out.
• nmjohn 6y ago
  FWIW, for a long time I've worked roughly 11 to 4 and have not caught any flack for it, as I get my work done. It entirely depends on the company you work for. (I'm not saying my situation is common, just that it does exist.)
  • war1025 6y ago
    Figured I'd chime in and say that I'm basically in the same situation. I get to the office somewhere between 10 and 10:30 and leave somewhere between 4:30 and 5, with a generous lunch in the middle. My mantra is "Do one useful thing a day" Sometimes I get several useful things done, but as long as you get at least one useful thing done every day, it adds up into accomplishing quite a bit. The actual "working hours" part is mainly valuable, in my opinion, for being available for random questions or issues that come up. Basically, when can I reliably get a response from you if I need something.
• Fishysoup 6y ago
  I think the need for an office depends a lot on the type of work that needs to be done. If you're working in R&D or science, for example, it's really (really) hard to make much progress alone, without people bouncing ideas around, showing you how things work, whiteboards, etc. Sure, you could do some of that on zoom, but the psychology of it is very different, and the spontaneous component of it is gone completely. It's awkward to slack someone with "hey do you want to talk about some ideas i have, using the awkward zoom annotation tool?". They'll probably say yes, but then other people who might have something interesting to contribute (or learn) will not be present. Also the feeling of interacting with people via videochat is weird, especially if you're new to the workplace. Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home; b) human beings around you who work on similar things; and c) a sense of community. I realize that many workplaces are toxic and don't offer any good versions of b) or c), and working remotely could be better then (though a better idea would be to find a new employer if you can). But, though many people are thriving in this new work-from-home environment, equally many or more are suffering. Also, regarding the 4-5 hours of productivity a day: yeah! There's been a lot of studies on this, and some countries/companies have been experimenting with 4 day work-weeks or shorter workdays. There's definitely progress to be made there.
  • PragmaticPulp 6y ago
    > Also, for many people it's vital to have a) a workspace that isn't your home; This is easy to forget when you don't have any children at home. Many parents with young children at home are struggling with the work from home situation. Even among people without kids at home, having a dedicated office space can make a huge difference. When I managed remote teams, the people who carved out dedicated office spaces for themselves always seemed to do better than those who tried to work where they also played video games, for example. It's important to be able to context shift into and out of work mode. Going into a physical office is the biggest context shift, but even at home you can create this context shift by having a dedicated work space. It doesn't have to be big or even permanent, but it's helpful to have some spacial cues that you're in work mode vs. home mode.
    • minerjoe 6y ago
• Nition 6y ago
  I have to say I'm a bit surprised at the positive reaction to this here. This person admits that they're contracted to work 40 hours/wk but they they only do 20-25 hours when working from home. I've always tracked my time even when working from home to make sure I'm doing the amount of hours I'm getting paid for. If this person was contracted to achieve a certain amount of work done I'd totally understand, but they're contracted based on time. Kinda surprised how positive the Hacker News crowd is towards skipping work for up to 50% of contracted time. I know work gets tiring, but I find it hard believe anyone can really do great solid work for half a day and then can't possibly get anything productive done in the second half.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  • shard972 6y ago
    Probably a lot more common to work more than less so it all washes out in the end.
  • nugget 6y ago
    Most companies do a very poor job of accurately measuring employee productivity/output on an individual basis. It seems to me that “40 hours per week” made sense for physical jobs where output was a multiple of hours worked, and then was adopted by newer firms as a low friction, culturally accepted placeholder for “give us your best effort and don’t have another full time job at the same time”.
    • nradov 6y ago
      It is simply impossible to accurately measure knowledge worker productivity on an individual basis. Any attempt to do so causes serious unintended consequences where employees attempt to game the metrics instead of doing the right thing for the business.
      • nugget 6y ago
        I think it's possible, but usually non-cost-effective because it has to be done on a 1:1 basis and therefore doesn't scale well. For example: I can intensively audit a developer's code for a couple weeks (in real time) and usually get a good feel for the blend of skill/time/effort being invested. But it's so time intensive for me to do that, that it's reserved for extreme situations.
• bargl 6y ago
  But the outcome isn't the same for the company. I go to lunch, and chat with co-workers. They tell me about their project and I tell them about mine. Then I get a requirement that I have to build something that interacts with their project and I have a rough idea of how it works because we've been talking about it a little bit. So instead of starting from nothing I'm starting from some knowledge. Even though that part of the conversation was 10 min of a 30 min conversation there are useful parts that happen in the office. I've been trying to replicate that at home more.
  • everly 6y ago
    I think I understand the point you’re making and I agree that there can be some synergy that comes from working together in person but it can also go the other way. Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale. Plus, the situation you describe consists of the company extracting extra value from me during a time that is supposed to belong to me, not a time that they are compensating me for, which also makes your point ring hollow.
    • bargl 6y ago
      I wasn't clear, I meant when I'm socializing with co-workers while I'm on the clock, such as gathering around the cubicle. Not at home or a bar. Edited: for clarity. The OP mentioned they work 4-5 hours a day and are distracted the other 3-4 when at work (in the office). I was saying during those 3-4 hours you have multiple side conversations (on company time) that it makes sense to the company to encourage. Not just cuz co-workers who get along have a better work environment, but that it makes a more interconnected environment. > Office environments can also be toxic and decrease productivity/morale. This is a good point.
• ericmcer 6y ago
  I have been struggling with this a bit. It is kinda like the “unlimited PTO!” phenomenon where it is honor system based but can trick more work out of people. It is difficult to prove 8 hours of engineering work so the stress of my week can vary wildly based accuracy of estimates and how desperate I am to prove my skills haha.
• ipiz0618 6y ago
  Glad to see I'm not the only one..I wrote a script that records (manually) how much time I am able to focus each day, and it averages around 5 hours. On the days when I have to work overtime, it'd be around 6.5 hours.
• alexashka 6y ago
  I can easily imagine being judged based on my output, not my etiquette. It'd reveal most people to be largely about etiquette, largely useless if not outright harmful in terms of output if contemplated a little. Most software jobs are re-implementing the same shit another company has already done. It's worse than useless - sipping tequila on the beach would actually be a net benefit for humanity - it'd alleviate stress, tension, traffic, hubris, carbon footprint among other things. If contemplated a little more - most jobs are enabling this insane rat race and the immense infrastructure around it, which nobody individually is really that interested in continuing. It's like religion or circumcision - we do and believe things and we don't even know why - most would be better off not knowing and not believing - just give them tequila and a beach :)
• rafaelvasco 6y ago
  I feel exactly like this. I can work , focused at most 4 hours every day. After that, I want to stand up and go running because my legs are killing me. So home office is heaven. When I'm done I'm done.
• systematical 6y ago
  Or actually work the full 8-ish hours a day Mon-Thurs and call it an early Friday by noon.
• cel1ne 6y ago
  I have worked for many years as a software-developer and found that more than 5 effective hours per day are impossible or at least not sustainable. 30-32 hours per week is perfect. More is just useless. I have heard that this seems to be true for most intellectual work that requires concentration (5 hours daily max). No sources on that, though.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  One of the best realities for WFH is that one doesn’t have to pretend to work after burning out for the day.
• schwartzworld 6y ago
  I'm a developer and pre-covid typically only stayed in the office until 2pm most days (lunch with the team, work for an hour then leave). I would tell everybody that I was going to work from home the rest of the day. Nobody ever cared. this is the future I dream of for all of us.
• jermaustin1 6y ago
  This is basically the same for me, plus the commute. The office manager doesn't get in until 8-9am and he was the only person who could unlock the office, and would leave around 5:30pm, meaning if you want lunch away from the office, you aren't going to hit 40 hours per week. Where as now, I start my day around 6-7am (I wake up "early" every morning), I try and quit around 4pm, and take a 1-2 hour lunch sometime between the two. This schedule is only possible working from home. I now hit 40 hours per week week every single week that I work all 5 days, where as before I would hit 30 hours. And even weeks where I only work 4 days, I still hit ~35 hours after shrinking my lunch.