4 ms·

WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000. For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people jus

by lxe 3y ago

WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000. For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware.

Aloha 3y ago
IMO, it wasnt really until 2015 that we had the bandwidth available everywhere to do widespread WFH.
- marcosdumay 3y ago
  You mean widespread remote meetings? Because there's more to work than meetings. Developers have been very productive in remote-only teams since the 90's.
  - Aloha 3y ago
    Remote meetings are just one problem, I cant imagine trying to run SMB (or even the somewhat lighter NFS) calls over an 144 kbit ISDL or ISDN connection, even on an ADSL connection with a 384 or 768 upstream would be painful. Maybe remote over connections that slow is fine if you're using version control - checking out the changes to the source tree, making changes, and checking them back in - its not okay if you're trying to open/change/save multi-meg excel files, things where you cant make incremental writes to. tbh, the most common way I saw people working remote in the 90's and early 00's was Citrix or similar other remote work tools. The broad thing is, the size of say.. software or scripting when I'm doing that, is a fraction of the size of my project docs, and are often stored to the server asynchronously - when I have to make drawings, its a different world.
PartiallyTyped 3y ago
I wish upper management would understand that some of us need silence to work due to sensory issues and the office doesn't provide something of that nature. Sound blocking headphones don't solve everything.
- nine_zeros 3y ago
  Wishful thinking. For upper management, facetime is the work. They spend 7 hours in meetings, 1 hour reviewing spreadsheets, then they go home and sip wine. While engineers go home and log in again to finally do actual work or to go on-call.
- Sterm 3y ago
  Upper management has their own offices. Of course they don't understand what open offices are like. It's like planes, they only suck if you're in economy class, first and business are great. Why would you want to fly faster when you have an actual bed?
  - cassianoleal 3y ago
    It's interesting that you make that comparison. I hate flying. Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. It helps very much for sure. There's no comparison between peasant class and business. That said, it's still a crappy experience for me. There's the commute to and from the airport. There's the waiting, which is not good even if you have access to good lounges. There's more waiting, sometimes for many hours, if you're making connections. Finally, and the worst of all for me, there's noise, crappy toilets and especially the low pressure in the cabin which makes everything in my body ache. My own office would be a clear and obvious improvement over a shared seat in an open plan. It would still not be anywhere near as good as my home office.
    - Sterm 3y ago
      >Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. Fly first and report back. The rest of it is because you're still in the peasant launge. First class even gets its own passport queue.
      - cassianoleal 3y ago
        I never really had an issue with passport queues. Most airports I travel through have automated gates and it takes literally seconds to get through. When there's a queue, it's usually no more than 1-5 people getting through 5-10 gates so it takes no time at all. Changing class won't make any of the issues I pointed out better, with the possible exception of the toilets.
codyb 3y ago
I like having company hardware. But agreed on the first premise. Open offices are an abomination. That being said, I do think younger engineers can be a bit better off from the human perspective joining an office just do to getting a lot of social interaction, and hanging out with higher level engineers. I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote. Being remote works for me (even when I was younger cause I love sitting and hammering my head on shit until I figure it out), but a fair number of my coworkers genuinely enjoy going into the office. It's interesting. But yes, agreed for the most part. Can't imagine wanting to go 5 days a week though lol.
- autoexec 3y ago
  > I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote. This I agree with. I've worked on small 4-6 person teams that had people from different backgrounds and at different skill levels and we all got along and worked really well together and a ton of knowledge was shared. It's very rare to find something like that, but when you do it's exciting and you start to get the feeling that together you could solve anything. Looking back though, almost all of the actual learning and camaraderie took place when we weren't working on actual work. Most of it was while we were showing off personal accomplishments or weird side projects or arguing about random things. Any time you get a bunch of friends together who share common interests you get that sort of thing. Very rarely do you get lucky enough to have that in a workplace though. Still, I think remote workers can still find like-minded people from diverse backgrounds themselves outside of the office to help them grow and develop without being forced to spend hours every single day with a group of people they aren't ever going to be friends with.
tharkun__ 3y ago
If a company requires me to bring my own hardware they better offer a "sign on bonus" equivalent to the cost of said hardware. Coz I ain't gonna install whatever corporate Spyware they require to be installed onto my hardware. Heck even their corporate hardware sits on a separate vlan that has no access except to the internet.
- walrus01 3y ago
  New hires should also be skeptical of a company that too-blindly trusts people to BYOD arbitrary workstations. Like, how do you really know that the person's BYOD workstation is fully up to date on patches for its relevant OS, doesn't have any viruses or trojans or screenshot/screen recording tools running on it? Or unauthorized Anydesk/Teamviewer, etc? It's indicative of a company that doesn't take security seriously as something that should be built into a product from its foundation, or as a general corporate philosophy.
gregd 3y ago
I have been fortunate enough to work from home since early 2000s. For many reasons I don't want to use my own hardware for doing that though. The main one being e-discovery. If your company is forced to go through a discovery process, if you've accessed company resources via your personal hardware, it becomes part of that discovery process. Additionally, licensing issues crop up, etc. But it doesn't surprise me that companies who are forcing people into the office are having a hard time recruiting. If Covid showed us anything, it was that we could all work from home and be just as productive, if not more so, doing it. IMHO, forcing me into an office is actually a punishment. Why punish me for the high cost of your real estate?
- ryandrake 3y ago
  Great point about discovery and the importance of keeping work and personal devices strictly separate. There was a story making the rounds on HN last year about someone who kept... well... intimate pictures on their mixed personal/work device and had to surrender the device when their company was involved in a lawsuit. Don't cross the streams!
theshrike79 3y ago
As long as "own hardware" is my choice, then I agree. My current setup changes from work to private mode by switching one USB-C cable from my work laptop to my own Mac Mini.
walrus01 3y ago
> WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000. At a certain level of network engineering and in the telecom business it has been such since 2002 or so. Many of the people who run certain large ISPs have been fully remote (or at least 85-90% remote, if you count time with meetings and conferences) since 2000.
at-fates-hands 3y ago
>> For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware. It took a long time for employees to convince companies they can be productive when they're left to their own devices. I've seen both sides of it. Back in 2010, I worked for a large company that was experimenting with some ROWE "Results Orientated Work Environment" which was basically people working off site three days a week. As long as you're productive and hit your metrics, you were good and left alone. We had a major project and two contractors just completely stopped coming in, did barely any work and left the team high and dry three days before a major release of the site we were building. After that, the company killed the experiment and required everybody to be in the office 5 days a week no matter what, no excuses. I also worked for another company that slowly rolled out a similar program. We had three pilot developers. Then you had to apply to be able to get approved to WFH three days a week. Therefore, management was only allowing people who were hitting their numbers and had good metrics to get into the program. This went on for two years until they started relaxing a lot of the rules until they hit some hard times and shut it down completely. I work for a huge health care company and they were VERY leery about letting people WFH even during COVID because they were petrified that production was going to drop off too much. Even at the height of the pandemic they tried several times to get people back into the office - but as usual, there were rarely any takers. It was a bit of a running joke at the time, but after a full calendar year, they relented and they were able to confirm that production had instead actually increased and essentially gave a vote of confidence for a lot of teams they were fully capable of WFH full time without a drop off in productivity.
CamperBob2 3y ago
Looking at it from a sympathy-for-the-devil standpoint, WFH is a serious dilemma for management. The problem is that almost everybody has traditionally been OK with working in an office (necessarily so), and management as a class is tasked and structured accordingly. As for the workers themselves, some people are OK either way, some people insist on WFH (raises hand), and some people absolutely can't deal with WFH. Maybe the latter people have stronger-than-usual social needs by the standards of stereotypical engineering workers, and genuinely contribute more as part of a physically-present team. Asking those folks to adapt to a solitary work life is like asking me to get up at 6 AM and hit the freeway every morning. It's not going to happen... at least, not for long. Or maybe they live in a one-bedroom apartment with a spouse and child or three. It's easy for some of us hardcore WFH advocates to forget how privileged we are. So now, management has to decide how to get the most out of all of these workers. I believe that those who put their foot down and demand RTO will eventually be outcompeted by those who don't, but that doesn't make the job of converting a previously office-oriented culture to hybrid or exclusive WFH an easy one. Middle management without appropriate IT support, for example, is going to fail at the WFH transition no matter what they do. Now, throw ML into the mix, and it's easy to see that we are in for a tumultuous couple of decades. I keep recalling the words of Nikola Tesla at the dawn of electrification: Humanity will be like an anthill stirred up with a stick. The changes that are coming are bigger than any of us probably think.

by lxe 3y ago

Aloha 3y ago

IMO, it wasnt really until 2015 that we had the bandwidth available everywhere to do widespread WFH.

marcosdumay 3y ago
You mean widespread remote meetings? Because there's more to work than meetings. Developers have been very productive in remote-only teams since the 90's.
- Aloha 3y ago
  Remote meetings are just one problem, I cant imagine trying to run SMB (or even the somewhat lighter NFS) calls over an 144 kbit ISDL or ISDN connection, even on an ADSL connection with a 384 or 768 upstream would be painful. Maybe remote over connections that slow is fine if you're using version control - checking out the changes to the source tree, making changes, and checking them back in - its not okay if you're trying to open/change/save multi-meg excel files, things where you cant make incremental writes to. tbh, the most common way I saw people working remote in the 90's and early 00's was Citrix or similar other remote work tools. The broad thing is, the size of say.. software or scripting when I'm doing that, is a fraction of the size of my project docs, and are often stored to the server asynchronously - when I have to make drawings, its a different world.

PartiallyTyped 3y ago

I wish upper management would understand that some of us need silence to work due to sensory issues and the office doesn't provide something of that nature. Sound blocking headphones don't solve everything.

nine_zeros 3y ago
Wishful thinking. For upper management, facetime is the work. They spend 7 hours in meetings, 1 hour reviewing spreadsheets, then they go home and sip wine. While engineers go home and log in again to finally do actual work or to go on-call.
Sterm 3y ago
Upper management has their own offices. Of course they don't understand what open offices are like. It's like planes, they only suck if you're in economy class, first and business are great. Why would you want to fly faster when you have an actual bed?
- cassianoleal 3y ago
  It's interesting that you make that comparison. I hate flying. Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. It helps very much for sure. There's no comparison between peasant class and business. That said, it's still a crappy experience for me. There's the commute to and from the airport. There's the waiting, which is not good even if you have access to good lounges. There's more waiting, sometimes for many hours, if you're making connections. Finally, and the worst of all for me, there's noise, crappy toilets and especially the low pressure in the cabin which makes everything in my body ache. My own office would be a clear and obvious improvement over a shared seat in an open plan. It would still not be anywhere near as good as my home office.
  - Sterm 3y ago
    >Never flew 1st class but have flown business class a few times. Fly first and report back. The rest of it is because you're still in the peasant launge. First class even gets its own passport queue.
    - cassianoleal 3y ago
      I never really had an issue with passport queues. Most airports I travel through have automated gates and it takes literally seconds to get through. When there's a queue, it's usually no more than 1-5 people getting through 5-10 gates so it takes no time at all. Changing class won't make any of the issues I pointed out better, with the possible exception of the toilets.

codyb 3y ago

I like having company hardware. But agreed on the first premise. Open offices are an abomination. That being said, I do think younger engineers can be a bit better off from the human perspective joining an office just do to getting a lot of social interaction, and hanging out with higher level engineers. I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote. Being remote works for me (even when I was younger cause I love sitting and hammering my head on shit until I figure it out), but a fair number of my coworkers genuinely enjoy going into the office. It's interesting. But yes, agreed for the most part. Can't imagine wanting to go 5 days a week though lol.

autoexec 3y ago
> I learned a fair amount watching my engineer coworkers argue about bullshit that I'd probably not have gotten if I was remote. This I agree with. I've worked on small 4-6 person teams that had people from different backgrounds and at different skill levels and we all got along and worked really well together and a ton of knowledge was shared. It's very rare to find something like that, but when you do it's exciting and you start to get the feeling that together you could solve anything. Looking back though, almost all of the actual learning and camaraderie took place when we weren't working on actual work. Most of it was while we were showing off personal accomplishments or weird side projects or arguing about random things. Any time you get a bunch of friends together who share common interests you get that sort of thing. Very rarely do you get lucky enough to have that in a workplace though. Still, I think remote workers can still find like-minded people from diverse backgrounds themselves outside of the office to help them grow and develop without being forced to spend hours every single day with a group of people they aren't ever going to be friends with.

tharkun__ 3y ago

If a company requires me to bring my own hardware they better offer a "sign on bonus" equivalent to the cost of said hardware. Coz I ain't gonna install whatever corporate Spyware they require to be installed onto my hardware. Heck even their corporate hardware sits on a separate vlan that has no access except to the internet.

walrus01 3y ago
New hires should also be skeptical of a company that too-blindly trusts people to BYOD arbitrary workstations. Like, how do you really know that the person's BYOD workstation is fully up to date on patches for its relevant OS, doesn't have any viruses or trojans or screenshot/screen recording tools running on it? Or unauthorized Anydesk/Teamviewer, etc? It's indicative of a company that doesn't take security seriously as something that should be built into a product from its foundation, or as a general corporate philosophy.

gregd 3y ago

I have been fortunate enough to work from home since early 2000s. For many reasons I don't want to use my own hardware for doing that though. The main one being e-discovery. If your company is forced to go through a discovery process, if you've accessed company resources via your personal hardware, it becomes part of that discovery process. Additionally, licensing issues crop up, etc. But it doesn't surprise me that companies who are forcing people into the office are having a hard time recruiting. If Covid showed us anything, it was that we could all work from home and be just as productive, if not more so, doing it. IMHO, forcing me into an office is actually a punishment. Why punish me for the high cost of your real estate?

ryandrake 3y ago
Great point about discovery and the importance of keeping work and personal devices strictly separate. There was a story making the rounds on HN last year about someone who kept... well... intimate pictures on their mixed personal/work device and had to surrender the device when their company was involved in a lawsuit. Don't cross the streams!

theshrike79 3y ago

As long as "own hardware" is my choice, then I agree. My current setup changes from work to private mode by switching one USB-C cable from my work laptop to my own Mac Mini.

walrus01 3y ago

> WFH should have been the norm for tech and office white collar workers since 2000. At a certain level of network engineering and in the telecom business it has been such since 2002 or so. Many of the people who run certain large ISPs have been fully remote (or at least 85-90% remote, if you count time with meetings and conferences) since 2000.

at-fates-hands 3y ago

>> For decades, I've been scratching my head as to why can't software people just work from the comfort of their own home and their own hardware. It took a long time for employees to convince companies they can be productive when they're left to their own devices. I've seen both sides of it. Back in 2010, I worked for a large company that was experimenting with some ROWE "Results Orientated Work Environment" which was basically people working off site three days a week. As long as you're productive and hit your metrics, you were good and left alone. We had a major project and two contractors just completely stopped coming in, did barely any work and left the team high and dry three days before a major release of the site we were building. After that, the company killed the experiment and required everybody to be in the office 5 days a week no matter what, no excuses. I also worked for another company that slowly rolled out a similar program. We had three pilot developers. Then you had to apply to be able to get approved to WFH three days a week. Therefore, management was only allowing people who were hitting their numbers and had good metrics to get into the program. This went on for two years until they started relaxing a lot of the rules until they hit some hard times and shut it down completely. I work for a huge health care company and they were VERY leery about letting people WFH even during COVID because they were petrified that production was going to drop off too much. Even at the height of the pandemic they tried several times to get people back into the office - but as usual, there were rarely any takers. It was a bit of a running joke at the time, but after a full calendar year, they relented and they were able to confirm that production had instead actually increased and essentially gave a vote of confidence for a lot of teams they were fully capable of WFH full time without a drop off in productivity.

CamperBob2 3y ago

Looking at it from a sympathy-for-the-devil standpoint, WFH is a serious dilemma for management. The problem is that almost everybody has traditionally been OK with working in an office (necessarily so), and management as a class is tasked and structured accordingly. As for the workers themselves, some people are OK either way, some people insist on WFH (raises hand), and some people absolutely can't deal with WFH. Maybe the latter people have stronger-than-usual social needs by the standards of stereotypical engineering workers, and genuinely contribute more as part of a physically-present team. Asking those folks to adapt to a solitary work life is like asking me to get up at 6 AM and hit the freeway every morning. It's not going to happen... at least, not for long. Or maybe they live in a one-bedroom apartment with a spouse and child or three. It's easy for some of us hardcore WFH advocates to forget how privileged we are. So now, management has to decide how to get the most out of all of these workers. I believe that those who put their foot down and demand RTO will eventually be outcompeted by those who don't, but that doesn't make the job of converting a previously office-oriented culture to hybrid or exclusive WFH an easy one. Middle management without appropriate IT support, for example, is going to fail at the WFH transition no matter what they do. Now, throw ML into the mix, and it's easy to see that we are in for a tumultuous couple of decades. I keep recalling the words of Nikola Tesla at the dawn of electrification: Humanity will be like an anthill stirred up with a stick. The changes that are coming are bigger than any of us probably think.