4 ms·

I totally agree. Where I work, in-person work became optional. Strangely, everyone 35 or younger decided to work from home (most of them don't have kids, which

by xab33 4y ago

I totally agree. Where I work, in-person work became optional. Strangely, everyone 35 or younger decided to work from home (most of them don't have kids, which would be the one decent excuse), but the older people mostly come in. At 34, I'm sort of in-between, but enjoyed bantering with people my age or younger. So I get the worst of both worlds: my boss can still come in my office at any random time and bug me about whatever, but not the social life or the ability to bounce ideas off each other when designing a new system. All-online communication simply does not work for creative or complex tasks. The youngsters get practically nothing done -- I worked with them for several years before the pandemic, so I know for a fact that their productivity specifically went down 90% -- and guess who gets to pick up the slack? It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst. No matter what excuses they make, it's not good for them in the long run, since it will be reflected in their CV. I'm not against fun, even during work hours, but you have to get the job done. It's a medical research institution with a small clinic, so there are, as you suggest, additional issues there. I think science, in particular, requires in-depth, in-person conversations and that is where most of the really good ideas come from.

sinecure 4y ago
This has been my experience as well at 32. The commercial real estate firm I work at has a 4 days in the office policy, so we have a fairly robust social atmosphere. You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally. The young people we're getting are like they're from another planet. They think it's' fine to come in late and leave early every day, they only do the bare minimum of work assigned and show zero engagement to help the firm beyond the scope of their assigned tasks. They're all coming from colleges that were remote or jobs that were work from home. How can you learn as a young professional in a work from home setting? You need to sit in on meetings, phone calls and discussions, you need to absorb the whole office around you, not just sitting alone at your computer.
- 0xRusty 4y ago
  I agree, and adding to this another thing I find now is it's very very hard to spot young talent now if they're fully remote. In a team of 100+ people how can I remember who's performing well, who's good at certain tasks etc when all you are to me is a muted microphone and an avatar with no camera showing. Working in an office with others post COVID isn't about what we're asking you to do, it's about what you bring to the table and offer others. Communication problems among the younger workers (I mean lets say under 25 who've hardly worked in an office before because of covid) are a real problem now. Some don't know how to act, how to behave, how to muck in and be part of a professional workforce with people who have 10, 20, 30 years more experience than them.
- cad_engineer 4y ago
  > You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally. just curious, why do you think that is? I spent several years working on project sharing and data visualization features for an architectural CAD program. you could show/hide/recolor all your objects on the fly to emphasize key details, sketch on top of viewports, play around with a clip cube in 3D (personally fixed a lot of bugs with that one...), and sync all your changes back to the main project file to share with colleagues. some of these features were a bit rough around the edges, admittedly, but I always got the impression they were pretty popular with our customers. I'm a little stunned to hear that you and your colleagues just want to print out a couple viewports and look at them on a piece of paper.
lowbloodsugar 4y ago
>It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst. You don’t have the data to shows that in-person is necessary. And there are plenty of remote-only companies that make it work. It sounds like you’ve decided that there can only be one possible solution and then given up. That kind of thinking might explain a whole lot about the situation.

by xab33 4y ago

sinecure 4y ago

This has been my experience as well at 32. The commercial real estate firm I work at has a 4 days in the office policy, so we have a fairly robust social atmosphere. You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally. The young people we're getting are like they're from another planet. They think it's' fine to come in late and leave early every day, they only do the bare minimum of work assigned and show zero engagement to help the firm beyond the scope of their assigned tasks. They're all coming from colleges that were remote or jobs that were work from home. How can you learn as a young professional in a work from home setting? You need to sit in on meetings, phone calls and discussions, you need to absorb the whole office around you, not just sitting alone at your computer.

0xRusty 4y ago
I agree, and adding to this another thing I find now is it's very very hard to spot young talent now if they're fully remote. In a team of 100+ people how can I remember who's performing well, who's good at certain tasks etc when all you are to me is a muted microphone and an avatar with no camera showing. Working in an office with others post COVID isn't about what we're asking you to do, it's about what you bring to the table and offer others. Communication problems among the younger workers (I mean lets say under 25 who've hardly worked in an office before because of covid) are a real problem now. Some don't know how to act, how to behave, how to muck in and be part of a professional workforce with people who have 10, 20, 30 years more experience than them.
cad_engineer 4y ago
> You can't design a building on a webinar, you need to sit together in a conference room, roll the blueprints out on the table and point to things, sketch changes, review pro formas.. it can't be replaced digitally. just curious, why do you think that is? I spent several years working on project sharing and data visualization features for an architectural CAD program. you could show/hide/recolor all your objects on the fly to emphasize key details, sketch on top of viewports, play around with a clip cube in 3D (personally fixed a lot of bugs with that one...), and sync all your changes back to the main project file to share with colleagues. some of these features were a bit rough around the edges, admittedly, but I always got the impression they were pretty popular with our customers. I'm a little stunned to hear that you and your colleagues just want to print out a couple viewports and look at them on a piece of paper.

lowbloodsugar 4y ago

>It turns out that even relatively motivated PhD students actually need in-person accountability and direction, or they just spin their wheels at best, or goof off at worst. You don’t have the data to shows that in-person is necessary. And there are plenty of remote-only companies that make it work. It sounds like you’ve decided that there can only be one possible solution and then given up. That kind of thinking might explain a whole lot about the situation.