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I love working onsite and observing my coworkers spend 30 minutes making breakfasts and taking 2-hour lunches and finishing a 1-hour meeting in 20-30 minutes an
by nikolay 4y ago
I love working onsite and observing my coworkers spend 30 minutes making breakfasts and taking 2-hour lunches and finishing a 1-hour meeting in 20-30 minutes and then spending the rest of the blocked time just talking about anything but work as they have a proof on the calendars that they've actually worked. Some of my best memories from work are of people starting to fall asleep during meetings scheduled shortly after lunch when everybody's hypoglycemic due to the insulin putting off the carb-heavy lunch! Very productive, no doubt! I've never seen a software engineer put more than 3-4 hours of productive work onsite! Meanwhile, after 10 years being exclusively remote, I've put tons more productive hours working from home a day. In fact, knowing I'm privileged, I put in more than 40 hours/week most weeks - not because my manager tells me to, but because I want to!
You can build a mediocre product with micromanagers - no doubt, I've seen it, but I've never seen great products being built under such poor, primitive management strategy! If you really want a great, performing, and creative team, then do a better job at hiring and motivating people! Policing works only for certain types of jobs, not for jobs where managers are less smart than the workers! And I yet must see proof that exchanging viruses onsite is more productive than online meetings, which could also get recorded, etc.
- blablabla123 4y agoLunch is a big one. Working remotely since the pandemic started I haven't ate this healthy in almost a decade. (And I don't need a coffee after lunch to not be sleepy) Also I've seen much higher quality 1:1 meetings.
- mFixman 4y agoDon't forget not being able to have meetings due to a lack of free meeting rooms, not being able to communicate so you don't bother your coworkers in an open office, and not being able to concentrate because some coworker is talking! My company does hybrid work, so it has fewer desks than employees. If you don't arrive early enough on event days you'll spend your day working on a sofa with your laptop on your legs. How productive!
- robbiemitchell 4y agoExecutives has larger, permanent desks (or offices) that don’t get bothered, and never get kicked out of a meeting room — but their assistants will kick you out of yours. The problem is invisible to them.
- wdb 4y agoIn my opinion if you go open office everyone should go open office even the bosses. A previous company did this. Often you would sit next to the CEO in the open office
- monster_group 4y agoThat's not practical at any company of a decent size. High level executives routinely discuss highly confidential information which cannot be shared with lower level employees until the right time (if at all). That's the reason why they have closed door offices. They need them.
- nixgeek 4y agoWhen HP made a big push towards open plan offices, one of the CEOs at the time, Meg Whitman, also moved into a “cube”. It’s fair to says hers was bigger than average, and access to her meant walking directly through the desk areas of two assistants, however it was undeniably a cube without full-height walls and in the style of everyone else’s at that worksite. Meg also had a conference room nearby reserved for her use, and did a fairly typical amount of travel (a lot!), but it wasn’t a purely symbolic gesture, the few meetings I had with her where we arrived early she often arose from her desk in the cube and walked over to the conference room. It seemed the desk got used. At that time HP was doing around $120B a year in revenue and had 330,000 employees but she didn’t say, “I need a closed door office”.
- jensensbutton 4y agoYou've never seen great products built by teams that work together in an office? You clearly need to get out of your house more. Maybe in-office will do you some good.
- theknocker 4y ago[dead]
- boopboopbadoop 4y agoThe isolation has drove him mad
- nikolay 4y agoI am not isolated - I have a great social life; I just don't need work to be social as well.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nikolay 4y agoNever said that! I said that I've never seen great products built by micromanaged teams!
- madduci 4y agoThe only benefit of being on-site (the only one!) Is that the meetings aren't scheduled _exactly_ one after each other, but you have the possibility to switch room, grab a coffee before the next meeting starts and also doing smalltalk. But being full time in an office is counter-productive as hell
- prng2021 4y agoI haven't seen that played out. When someone looks for open calendar availability, all they're looking for is an open slot for all attendees. Not 10 minutes after 1 or some of the attendees have finished a prior meeting. So you very well could have 1 meeting end at 10am and another start at 10am.
- 2devnull 4y agoThere’s an understanding that people may be a few minutes late because of travel time. I have experienced a shift in expectations, where being in a virtual meeting at the exact start time is more expected now, than when meetings occurred on site. Also I recall people going out to lunch together. At least where I work, work from home means no “lunch hour”.
- 988747 4y agoI had a good laugh when one of my previous employers tried to solve that with an Outlook plugin. You know what that plugin did? It scheduled half-hour meetings to be 25 minutes long, and 1h meetings to be 50 minutes long. It was actually advertised as a "feature": "Never be late for your next meeting" :)
- coev 4y agoThis setting in google calendar is called "speedy meetings" and my workplace turns it on by default even though we're full remote. People need bathroom breaks.
- hotpotamus 4y agoAnd what do you imagine these lazy co-workers are doing from home?
- sekai 4y agoWhy does he have to imagine? He can see the results of their work.
- greenthrow 4y agoI've been working in remote environments for 20 years. Productivity issues do not magically go away and are rarely just "people being lazy" unless you're not interviewing well.
- edgyquant 4y agoI’m a pro-remote manager but this is ridiculous hyperbole.
- astura 4y agoHacker news absolutely loves ridiculous hyperbole.
- halfmatthalfcat 4y agoThe point still stands, there’s so much distraction and waste in-office. While it may not rise to that level at most places, it most definitely does. I’ve seen it as well.
- 2devnull 4y agoI think it can depend on job duties and home environment. If you’re a manager and have a family or live with a SO, home is probably less productive. If you’re one of us who write code or build things, and you live alone, it’s almost 2X minimum productivity boost working at home.
- listenallyall 4y agoYea, at home your kids, your pets, your TV, your chores, your neighbors, your phone... definitely not distractions.
- Lacerda69 4y agodont have kids, pets or a tv. my phone is with me in the office. chores are taken care of in short breaks which i need to take anyway. not sure how neighbours would distract me. dont assume everyone else lives like you
- listenallyall 4y agoNo kids, pets or TV? You're the outlier. Your bosses know that, and that's why more of them are demanding people return to the office. Don't kill the messenger, dude.
- nextlevelwizard 4y agoOn other hand most people put even less time in while WFH. They still cook breakfast- only now it is for them, their spouse and kids. Then they need to feed the kids and probably also take the dog out. The we have a daily stand up and they start to think about going to the store to pick up something they forgot so they can start making lunch - again for whole family and feeding the kids. Then they get a little bit of work in with the same food coma as you described until its time for “remote coffee hang out” to make up for the lack of social interaction. And after that their spouse goes to a walk or to the gym with the neighbor so they need to watch the kids while still on the clock. Active work done per dat hovers around 1-2 hours and most of that is done while a kid is watching cartoons on full volume in the same room and constantly interrupting.
- lotsoweiners 4y agoOr they do what I do. Take my kids to school before work. Come home and skip breakfast (or just have a bowl of cereal). Then at the end of my shift, I go and pick up the kids.
- nextlevelwizard 4y agoThey could, but since their spouses are on maternity leave their kids can’t get to the government provided kindergarten and they don’t want to pay for private sector while the mom is at home and supposedly taking care of the kids
- eat 4y agoAnd yet with all of these scenarios you've described, the world keeps spinning. I've yet to see an example of of a company or product that has suffered due to knowledge workers realizing they can use WFH to put in fewer hours and make time to handle their actual important life tasks.
- nextlevelwizard 4y agoOr we could drop these people and have other people do their jobs
- Rebelgecko 4y agoHave you considered working multiple remote jobs at the same time? If you're salaried, seems silly to be putting in the overtime on just one job
- modernpink 4y agoThat all rings true, however the whole industry (or most of it) managed to be built 'on-site' pre-2020. It's not clear where "policing" comes into the discussion here. I actually think the executives calling for more on-site time actually _want_ their workers to take their free lunch, make breakfast and chitchat with their colleagues.
- kodt 4y agoI also know some people who are just playing video games and doing household chores 5 hours a day while working from home, and just respond to emails throughout the day so it seems like they are working.
- Supermancho 4y agoSounds like the company was unable to measure work expectations before other than attendance. I've played DF at work, I've programmed on my own laptop sitting at work, with nothing to do in my nice suit (JP Morgan Chase). Hell, I've been at companies where the Engineering team does NOTHING and has no expectations for days (Tiger Logic in Irvine, CA). I've seen engineers with Twitch up all day or Xena Warrior princess for multiple days as a marathon in an open plan office (doing a rendition of the IT Crowd). WFH is not the root problem, if the company doesn't have a problem with low expectations.
- wyclif 4y agoI've been working remote for the past seven years and I'm much more productive than ever before. I'm intermittent fasting right now, so I wake up early after a good night's sleep, do my morning routine, go for a walk and exercise. Then I hit my home office and get busy. I can get a lot done before lunchtime, always much more than I ever did when I was working in an office. Then I have lunch (for me it's really breakfast) with my family. After that, I set aside the afternoons for reading or learning something new; it might be Rust, a foreign language, writing, or a musical instrument. It's my personal investment time. The biggest savings for me are, of course, time. No commute saves a lot of wasted time, as well as avoiding a huge number of meetings that should have been an email, interruptions from people in the open office, micro-managing, DEI performativity, &c. Software engineers need large blocks of uninterrupted time in order to focus and get significant work done.
- roflyear 4y agoThe problem is the people you are talking about aren't going to work more at home. They will work even less. They ruin this for people like you and me because they can't be disciplined. If they aren't at an office they can't get their job done.
- bart_spoon 4y agoSo fire them. Everyone is hired to do a function. If someone can do that function with a minimal amount of time, why should they waste their extra time on performative work? Give them more to do, or accept they don’t need the amount of time in the standard work week to complete what you hired then to do. If they are goofing off at home and not completing their function, fire them. If you can’t even tell if the function is being done or not then the functions that aren’t being performed are those of management. But ensuring everyone comes to the office doesn’t solve that problem.
- electriclove 4y agoLarge companies can’t fire people as easily as you might think. Just look at the outrage on HN when a company lays off 10% (even though their numbers are still higher than in 2021).
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- shoulderfake 4y ago[dead]