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Maybe it's ok to have rough-sailing every now and then, so we can toughen up? I'm sorry to say this, having lived through various life-served situations, but y

• r3trohack3r 4y ago
  An alternative interpretation: Humans are social and many communities in America aren’t structured for independent relationship building leading to isolation if you don’t belong to a community (I.E. an office space, gym, or religion) However offices are poorly structured for focus. Counterintuitively, many of the companies we focus on in the WFH vs WFO debate are _knowledge worker_ roles where the product is ultimately a result of concerted focus time. It might not be that working at home and working from work aren’t good enough in general. Maybe offices have failed to incorporate what we know about optimizing a knowledge worker’s time while communities have failed to incorporate what we know about fostering relationships. So many are stuck picking their poison: forced relationships with co-workers in an office at the cost of focus or optimizing for focus at home at the cost of relationships.
  • zmxz 4y ago
    From your interpretation, it sounds like the office/business is solely responsible for creating an environment for the employee to thrive in. Even when given the opportunity for the knowledge worker to optimize and set up their work environment, the business is at fault if the worker is not satisfied. It's just ridiculous how many complaints there are in IT field. I doubt that anyone is missing out on talent if the "talent" complains about situations they themselves can improve.
    • r3trohack3r 4y ago
      > Even when given the opportunity for the knowledge worker to optimize and set up their work environment, the business is at fault if the worker is not satisfied. To make sure this point isn't being lost: It's not complaining about the impact on me. At the end of the day, I'm trading value for value. I select jobs where I can provide value - generally building a new system for my customer - and, in exchange, I receive value - generally money. My observation is this: the value that is being squandered isn't the workers, it's the businesses! The worker is getting paid, they are receiving their side of the bargain when trading value for value. The output of the worker is the value that belongs to the business which is exactly the value being squandered. Businesses are, of course, welcome to do that. I know upfront that if I subject myself to that work environment I will not be able to provide the maximum value for my time - and I bill based on the value I provide. I aim to maximize the value of my time and won't adjust my bill down to accommodate the impact of the office spaces they provide. Since I wont be able to provide them sufficient value at the rate that I charge, my moral code doesn't allow me to do business with these kinds of companies. It's just surprising to me that MAANG will give an engineer $500k per year, and then drop them into an environment that is known to be devastating to that worker's output. What gives me pause is that MAANG is _buying the output_ of that worker, appraising it at $500k annually, and then squandering it with a floor plan. > If the "talent" complains about situations they themselves can improve. Personally, I improved it by making remote work a strict requirement for jobs I'll accept. It didn't limit my salary as much as one might expect - my current job is paying parity with what I made at Netflix as a non-remote engineer. Short of my strategy, which could be summarized as "just say no," I'd be interested in hearing what other strategies there are for office employees to improve their conditions themselves.