4 ms·

I feel bad for people who don’t have friends, family, church, or any social activities at all outside of work. Was work socialization even that good? Meaningles

I feel bad for people who don’t have friends, family, church, or any social activities at all outside of work. Was work socialization even that good? Meaningless banter about TV shows and restaurants we like. I still have these as a remote worker anyway, but they take a bit more effort. I don’t like this concerted effort to make me feel bad about these hypothetical junior employees losing out on “mentoring” and lost “spontaneous innovations” that happen supposedly in offices. If you like that keep me out of it. The world has moved on and if you want to commute 2 hours a day be my guest, but don’t make me do it.

andyfleming 4y ago
One can enjoy spending time with coworkers at work, see the value of being in person together, AND not want to commute. At the end of the day, we all may choose to work remotely over being in office, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any trade-offs.
SpeedilyDamage 4y ago
Sorry but you can’t opt out; you’re either part of it and therefore part of the team, or you’re not and first on the chopping block when tough decisions get made. Punch in/punch out mentality has its place, but if you don’t have one of those jobs, the mismatch will eventually become unbearable for one side or the other. I think that’s where all this is leading; WFH roles will be smaller in scope, lower in salary (not CoL but lower responsibility), and much more focused on churning out work decided by the folks in the office who work as a team to grow the company. Maybe you’ll be happy with that role. Most won’t.
- monero-xmr 4y ago
  Actually I own the company and everyone is remote (hundreds of people). I have lost entry level hires because they didn’t like remote only. Now we don’t hire recent college grads anymore. I want everyone to work hard when they are working and enjoy their life when they aren’t working.
  - dahart 4y ago
    That’s pretty interesting as the owner to switch to not hiring juniors after they expressed trouble with remote work. Is this sustainable? Wrt your top comment, it’s probably worth acknowledging that work mentoring and water-cooler banter are two completely different work-social activities. People do need mentoring, even senior level hires, and without it, people are not going to succeed as often. How do you ensure mentoring is working with all-remote work? (I do think there are things you can do remotely, but as a senior developer, I have watched juniors struggling during the pandemic, and I don’t have the choice to stop hiring juniors.)
    - toomuchtodo 4y ago
      If their budget allows for it, there will always be enough seniors to hire that they don’t have to eat the cost of training juniors who aren’t compatible with their operating model. Let that be someone else’s problem if you can (and then hire who’ve they’ve developed away with the offer of remote work). It has not been my experience that senior folks need mentoring, only culture and people ops guidance (as every org is different in that regard). Coaching (distinctly different than mentoring) can be done between peers remotely.
      - dahart 4y ago
        That’s definitely true for one company, but of course can’t work for all companies. And even so, mentoring is still an important task, not to mention many other aspects of work communication that aren’t automatically enabled with Slack and email, so I’m genuinely curious how to make it as good remotely as it used to be in-person.
        toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Sure. What I have seen work is the mentor sitting in on video or conf calls as a regular participant, taking notes, and then coaching room for improvement one on one with those being coached. Praise in public, constructively critique in private. Observe, communicate, improve, repeat.
- civilized 4y ago
  The future is juniors learning how to work in structured office jobs, and if they become senior they are given more flexibility.
lifeisstillgood 4y ago
I used to think I would want to lose the commute. I mean I still do. But the loss of co-located colleagues is a real genuine barrier to effective productive working. So many issues that affect a "team" - misunderstandings that would have been a chair roll away are elevated to the status of conflict. Code has been written, lines have been drawn. And yet we pretend that it can all be dealt with by more "teamwork".
- freitzkriesler2 4y ago
  I haven't had this experience at all. My swes are based all around the world and I proudly manage them without having to do all of the annoying agile ceremonies. My philosophy is simple: keep the developers developing. If they aren't then you're wasting your money. I only break out the agile ceremonies for junior engineers who need the guidance and I do it all over video conferencing. But at the end of the day, our products get delivered, timelines met on or ahead of schedule, and typically on budget.
  - lifeisstillgood 4y ago
    But what do they develop? How does the business (which is also dislocated over great distances) know what it wants / express it when ... aww never mind. I know the answers Unless you (ie you) are the product owner / guiding light / main decisin maker then any "keep developers developing" is false. But in the likely circumstance that you taking a "product goal" and running with it - then are you getting the recognition and then the linked monetary rewards and access to other resources? or are you just doing a great job while others benefit? I hope it's the former
    - freitzkriesler2 4y ago
      Former is it! I am a product owner. We're a contract dev shop and build a myriad of things, at the end of the day, I define the functional requirements, work with UX designers, and work with my devs to pass that vision along. Once we have the MVP scoped and designs locked, there's a kick off meeting with the devs to explain it all and off we go. I'm particularly precise about how I define my stories with granular acceptance criteria linked to UX designs for how it should work. At the end of the day, I'm just a waiter for my devs to keep them going and prioritized. I don't reap rewards other than a paycheck and the satisfaction of a delivered product. Post MVP, we'll define a roadmap of what the customer wants depending on budget and do 4 week sprints to deliver. After working in a agile safe corporate environment for years, this was a breathe of fresh air. I see the agile tools as guidelines for picking and choosing depending on need. This wouldn't work in my old corporate job. Hope this explains it.
jonas21 4y ago
Have you ever considered that it's not some concerted effort to make you feel bad, but that there are actually a lot of people out there who could use the mentorship and social aspects of going into the office?
- bb88 4y ago
  I don't buy it. I share a screen and mentor people over MS Teams in my company right now. The tools are out there. I think the social aspect of a soul sucking 2 hour commute every day is more harmful to an individual than any positive aspect of being around peers at work.
  - civilized 4y ago
    And it's not like WFH is the universally enforced norm, the way office work used to be. There are still tons of companies that make everyone go to the office. People who need that are free to work for those companies. Nobody else owes them anything. When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
    - grugagag 4y ago
      Pay people for commute time (1 to 2 hours a day) and we’ll talk about it again. For now forcing people into noisy environments seems to be in their disservice. As far as productivity goes, forcing people back into offices would probably make them less productive as well.
- orwin 4y ago
  I just started a 95% remote job (basically a day every two weeks), and the mentorship/onboarding/integration is actually better remotely. When we are onsite, we discuss stuff, we discuss about previsou jobs and work a bit, but we cannot isolate, the open space is loud and it's tiring tbh. Remotely, i ask "hey, i'm doing task #WXY-99 on project A, who can explain the stuff to me", and i have a two-hour mentorship on the project specifics. And sometimes more. I was taught a lot of stuff. But the management is the best management i had in my life (Ie very hands-off, but with strict work procedure i had to learn the first day), and they discovered the way to make me twice as productive: 5 hours of meeting maximum every week (as i'm new, i have 3 hours on average). The rest should be work or one to one. [edit]: And we do a lot of 1:1. Lot of reviews, pair programming, mentoring, discussing new feature, designing a DB... All that stuff that i used to do in "meetings" with 10 people are done on 1:1. Its faster, its a lot less performative, thus more productive and make the interaction more "real".
bb88 4y ago
For many people that commute is 4 hours a day depending upon traffic. And then small failures in highway system can cause large delays for innumerable people just trying to get to work. > Was work socialization even that good? Yes and no. I have friends I met from going into the office. But most were still "work" friends -- people I wouldn't have socialized with had it not been for working at the same company. But for me the inane inter cubicle chatter is gone, and I can focus on getting work done first.
- inferiorhuman 4y ago
  And then small failures in highway system That sounds more like an infrastructure failure and an unwillingness to live near work than a failure of RTO. As much as HN seems to love shitting all over Muni and BART, I generally enjoyed my commute downtown. At one job it meant I got a chance to walk through the Castro in the morning, maybe stop off for a Whiz burger and banana shake if I was making a late appearance. When I was working further down Market the ride gave me an opportunity to interact with (and I know this is terrifying for many) people. E.g. I ran into my barber from high school, someone I went to K-12 with, a friend I hadn't seen in a few years, another ex-KDE contributor, etc. Hell, my commute gave me the opportunity to find and utilize an independent pharmacy – they were more of a community center than some automatons dispensing pills. Commuting via automobile sounds torturous by comparison, especially if you're spending two hours in traffic.
  - bb88 4y ago
    > That sounds more like an infrastructure failure It is but one fender bender can back up traffic for hours. We can argue about whether public transportation is good or not. We can argue for denser housing in urban centers and hope to win over the nimby's. The solutions we're proposing now would have been good 40 years ago, maybe? Now you need a solution for 40 years of population growth for these urban metro areas, and that won't be cheap, and it won't be free of NIMBY politics.
warner25 4y ago
Yeah, I was thinking mostly the same about the other thread and top comment today[1] about people who want us back in the office. I have empathy for people who are feeling lonely, but I don't want to sacrifice my own family's quality of life to make those people feel better. Just like the rise in home prices has been a boon for people who already own homes, the shift towards work-from-home has been a boon for people who already have their "foot in the door" with a spouse and kids, career capital, etc. while I know being somewhat disastrous for people who aren't yet established. The idea of having more of a "third place" sounds good, but I think it will be more realistic for me once my kids grow up. It's very tough to commit to something like an adult sports club, hobby group, etc. with little kids who demand a lot of hands-on attention, constantly get sick, and need early bedtimes or naps. Time is at such a premium, which is why working from home (or wherever else I want) is fantastic for me right now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668946
dgudkov 4y ago
>Was work socialization even that good? It doesn't really matter. It was OK for some, useless for others. People still don't have a choice. It's just a different lack of choice. Debates about WFH seem redundant at this point. There is not much value in endless anecdote-driven BTO vs WFH holywars. By now, it's obvious that WFH is good for some people and bad for others. Companies should do what that can to offer the desirable type of work to the employees who should have a choice. That's it. End of story. Back to work.
inferiorhuman 4y ago
Was work socialization even that good? Yes. Meaningless banter about TV shows and restaurants we like. If that's all you're getting out of it then sure, that doesn't sound fun. Me? I've made long-term friends, gone on vacations, successfully played matchmaker, etc. I enjoyed working with the person who was fluent in five or so Chinese dialects, the folks who engaged in meaningful political and philosophical discourse. I enjoyed the banter about shared hobbies. Hell, I enjoyed the opportunities to goof off (some say there are googly eyes on the inside of the refrigerator door to this day). Come to think of it, while I didn't enjoy working for this one guy, 1:1s involved getting out of the office and just going for a walk which was great.
ravagat 4y ago
I think the whole effort to make others bad because of the juniors/mentorship ideas are largely because a lot of people are failing to adapt. It doesn't help that the very institutions that the people rely on learning from haven't either.

andyfleming 4y ago

One can enjoy spending time with coworkers at work, see the value of being in person together, AND not want to commute. At the end of the day, we all may choose to work remotely over being in office, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any trade-offs.

SpeedilyDamage 4y ago

Sorry but you can’t opt out; you’re either part of it and therefore part of the team, or you’re not and first on the chopping block when tough decisions get made. Punch in/punch out mentality has its place, but if you don’t have one of those jobs, the mismatch will eventually become unbearable for one side or the other. I think that’s where all this is leading; WFH roles will be smaller in scope, lower in salary (not CoL but lower responsibility), and much more focused on churning out work decided by the folks in the office who work as a team to grow the company. Maybe you’ll be happy with that role. Most won’t.

monero-xmr 4y ago
Actually I own the company and everyone is remote (hundreds of people). I have lost entry level hires because they didn’t like remote only. Now we don’t hire recent college grads anymore. I want everyone to work hard when they are working and enjoy their life when they aren’t working.
- dahart 4y ago
  That’s pretty interesting as the owner to switch to not hiring juniors after they expressed trouble with remote work. Is this sustainable? Wrt your top comment, it’s probably worth acknowledging that work mentoring and water-cooler banter are two completely different work-social activities. People do need mentoring, even senior level hires, and without it, people are not going to succeed as often. How do you ensure mentoring is working with all-remote work? (I do think there are things you can do remotely, but as a senior developer, I have watched juniors struggling during the pandemic, and I don’t have the choice to stop hiring juniors.)
  - toomuchtodo 4y ago
    If their budget allows for it, there will always be enough seniors to hire that they don’t have to eat the cost of training juniors who aren’t compatible with their operating model. Let that be someone else’s problem if you can (and then hire who’ve they’ve developed away with the offer of remote work). It has not been my experience that senior folks need mentoring, only culture and people ops guidance (as every org is different in that regard). Coaching (distinctly different than mentoring) can be done between peers remotely.
    - dahart 4y ago
      That’s definitely true for one company, but of course can’t work for all companies. And even so, mentoring is still an important task, not to mention many other aspects of work communication that aren’t automatically enabled with Slack and email, so I’m genuinely curious how to make it as good remotely as it used to be in-person.
      - toomuchtodo 4y ago
        Sure. What I have seen work is the mentor sitting in on video or conf calls as a regular participant, taking notes, and then coaching room for improvement one on one with those being coached. Praise in public, constructively critique in private. Observe, communicate, improve, repeat.
civilized 4y ago
The future is juniors learning how to work in structured office jobs, and if they become senior they are given more flexibility.

lifeisstillgood 4y ago

I used to think I would want to lose the commute. I mean I still do. But the loss of co-located colleagues is a real genuine barrier to effective productive working. So many issues that affect a "team" - misunderstandings that would have been a chair roll away are elevated to the status of conflict. Code has been written, lines have been drawn. And yet we pretend that it can all be dealt with by more "teamwork".

freitzkriesler2 4y ago
I haven't had this experience at all. My swes are based all around the world and I proudly manage them without having to do all of the annoying agile ceremonies. My philosophy is simple: keep the developers developing. If they aren't then you're wasting your money. I only break out the agile ceremonies for junior engineers who need the guidance and I do it all over video conferencing. But at the end of the day, our products get delivered, timelines met on or ahead of schedule, and typically on budget.
- lifeisstillgood 4y ago
  But what do they develop? How does the business (which is also dislocated over great distances) know what it wants / express it when ... aww never mind. I know the answers Unless you (ie you) are the product owner / guiding light / main decisin maker then any "keep developers developing" is false. But in the likely circumstance that you taking a "product goal" and running with it - then are you getting the recognition and then the linked monetary rewards and access to other resources? or are you just doing a great job while others benefit? I hope it's the former
  - freitzkriesler2 4y ago
    Former is it! I am a product owner. We're a contract dev shop and build a myriad of things, at the end of the day, I define the functional requirements, work with UX designers, and work with my devs to pass that vision along. Once we have the MVP scoped and designs locked, there's a kick off meeting with the devs to explain it all and off we go. I'm particularly precise about how I define my stories with granular acceptance criteria linked to UX designs for how it should work. At the end of the day, I'm just a waiter for my devs to keep them going and prioritized. I don't reap rewards other than a paycheck and the satisfaction of a delivered product. Post MVP, we'll define a roadmap of what the customer wants depending on budget and do 4 week sprints to deliver. After working in a agile safe corporate environment for years, this was a breathe of fresh air. I see the agile tools as guidelines for picking and choosing depending on need. This wouldn't work in my old corporate job. Hope this explains it.

jonas21 4y ago

Have you ever considered that it's not some concerted effort to make you feel bad, but that there are actually a lot of people out there who could use the mentorship and social aspects of going into the office?

bb88 4y ago
I don't buy it. I share a screen and mentor people over MS Teams in my company right now. The tools are out there. I think the social aspect of a soul sucking 2 hour commute every day is more harmful to an individual than any positive aspect of being around peers at work.
- civilized 4y ago
  And it's not like WFH is the universally enforced norm, the way office work used to be. There are still tons of companies that make everyone go to the office. People who need that are free to work for those companies. Nobody else owes them anything. When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.
  - grugagag 4y ago
    Pay people for commute time (1 to 2 hours a day) and we’ll talk about it again. For now forcing people into noisy environments seems to be in their disservice. As far as productivity goes, forcing people back into offices would probably make them less productive as well.
orwin 4y ago
I just started a 95% remote job (basically a day every two weeks), and the mentorship/onboarding/integration is actually better remotely. When we are onsite, we discuss stuff, we discuss about previsou jobs and work a bit, but we cannot isolate, the open space is loud and it's tiring tbh. Remotely, i ask "hey, i'm doing task #WXY-99 on project A, who can explain the stuff to me", and i have a two-hour mentorship on the project specifics. And sometimes more. I was taught a lot of stuff. But the management is the best management i had in my life (Ie very hands-off, but with strict work procedure i had to learn the first day), and they discovered the way to make me twice as productive: 5 hours of meeting maximum every week (as i'm new, i have 3 hours on average). The rest should be work or one to one. [edit]: And we do a lot of 1:1. Lot of reviews, pair programming, mentoring, discussing new feature, designing a DB... All that stuff that i used to do in "meetings" with 10 people are done on 1:1. Its faster, its a lot less performative, thus more productive and make the interaction more "real".

bb88 4y ago

For many people that commute is 4 hours a day depending upon traffic. And then small failures in highway system can cause large delays for innumerable people just trying to get to work. > Was work socialization even that good? Yes and no. I have friends I met from going into the office. But most were still "work" friends -- people I wouldn't have socialized with had it not been for working at the same company. But for me the inane inter cubicle chatter is gone, and I can focus on getting work done first.

inferiorhuman 4y ago
And then small failures in highway system That sounds more like an infrastructure failure and an unwillingness to live near work than a failure of RTO. As much as HN seems to love shitting all over Muni and BART, I generally enjoyed my commute downtown. At one job it meant I got a chance to walk through the Castro in the morning, maybe stop off for a Whiz burger and banana shake if I was making a late appearance. When I was working further down Market the ride gave me an opportunity to interact with (and I know this is terrifying for many) people. E.g. I ran into my barber from high school, someone I went to K-12 with, a friend I hadn't seen in a few years, another ex-KDE contributor, etc. Hell, my commute gave me the opportunity to find and utilize an independent pharmacy – they were more of a community center than some automatons dispensing pills. Commuting via automobile sounds torturous by comparison, especially if you're spending two hours in traffic.
- bb88 4y ago
  > That sounds more like an infrastructure failure It is but one fender bender can back up traffic for hours. We can argue about whether public transportation is good or not. We can argue for denser housing in urban centers and hope to win over the nimby's. The solutions we're proposing now would have been good 40 years ago, maybe? Now you need a solution for 40 years of population growth for these urban metro areas, and that won't be cheap, and it won't be free of NIMBY politics.

warner25 4y ago

Yeah, I was thinking mostly the same about the other thread and top comment today[1] about people who want us back in the office. I have empathy for people who are feeling lonely, but I don't want to sacrifice my own family's quality of life to make those people feel better. Just like the rise in home prices has been a boon for people who already own homes, the shift towards work-from-home has been a boon for people who already have their "foot in the door" with a spouse and kids, career capital, etc. while I know being somewhat disastrous for people who aren't yet established. The idea of having more of a "third place" sounds good, but I think it will be more realistic for me once my kids grow up. It's very tough to commit to something like an adult sports club, hobby group, etc. with little kids who demand a lot of hands-on attention, constantly get sick, and need early bedtimes or naps. Time is at such a premium, which is why working from home (or wherever else I want) is fantastic for me right now. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668946 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34668946

dgudkov 4y ago

>Was work socialization even that good? It doesn't really matter. It was OK for some, useless for others. People still don't have a choice. It's just a different lack of choice. Debates about WFH seem redundant at this point. There is not much value in endless anecdote-driven BTO vs WFH holywars. By now, it's obvious that WFH is good for some people and bad for others. Companies should do what that can to offer the desirable type of work to the employees who should have a choice. That's it. End of story. Back to work.

inferiorhuman 4y ago

Was work socialization even that good? Yes. Meaningless banter about TV shows and restaurants we like. If that's all you're getting out of it then sure, that doesn't sound fun. Me? I've made long-term friends, gone on vacations, successfully played matchmaker, etc. I enjoyed working with the person who was fluent in five or so Chinese dialects, the folks who engaged in meaningful political and philosophical discourse. I enjoyed the banter about shared hobbies. Hell, I enjoyed the opportunities to goof off (some say there are googly eyes on the inside of the refrigerator door to this day). Come to think of it, while I didn't enjoy working for this one guy, 1:1s involved getting out of the office and just going for a walk which was great.

ravagat 4y ago

I think the whole effort to make others bad because of the juniors/mentorship ideas are largely because a lot of people are failing to adapt. It doesn't help that the very institutions that the people rely on learning from haven't either.