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I think the introduction of WFH during the pandemic hurt a lot of IT workers in the long-run. In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the

by ern 2y ago

I think the introduction of WFH during the pandemic hurt a lot of IT workers in the long-run. In the interests of “fairness” they are being ordered back to the office post-Covid even when their work processes mean they can be done perfectly well remotely, and even if they have widely geographically-distributed teams. Anecdotal, but we had a team that was split with 50% working remotely before Covid, and we saw an improvement when everyone was forced to work remotely: conversations that were being held in person were shared openly.

nox101 2y ago
I see the opposite. Conversations that used to happen in ear reach so I'd know what was going on with various team members and be able to contribute when I knew a solution are now conversation that happen in private chat or private VC. Productivity is way down. Even more interesting, a team lead lives in another country 6 times zones away. Some times they visit the main office for 1-2 weeks. Productivity shoots through the roof those weeks.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  Well yea, when I go on a work trip I tend to work a lot more those weeks because I’m not home. That doesn’t mean productivity during those two weeks are representative of normal.
  - DAGdug 2y ago
    It’s the local team, not the traveling team lead, that’s being spoken of here.
    - hnlmorg 2y ago
      It’s the same root cause. If there are foreign workers in town for a week then the whole team will often work around the visitors schedule.
- Olreich 2y ago
  Sounds like you need a group chat that people are willing to talk in. If that isn’t happening, then there’s a barrier to doing it that you need to resolve. Could be they’re fine with you listening in, but not the manager. Could be something else. Fix that, and get back to productive remotely.
- munksbeer 2y ago
  That's a shame. We're a mostly remote workplace with very high productivity. Hopefully you can figure out how to make it work, or move to a place that suits you better.
- NeutralCrane 2y ago
  That doesn’t seem like a sustainable alternative. In the case you are describing, the productivity boost is highly dependent on actually having the right people within ear reach. You are relying on the right people happening to hear other conversations. What if your team is large, so that even if you are all in office, the chances of stumbling into the right conversation is lower? What if you are grabbing lunch, or in the bathroom, or meeting with someone else when that conversation is happening? The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. That way, everyone can contribute to the conversation, it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to be in exactly the right place and right time to participate, and people can go back and review details very easily if needed. You are right that that doesn’t apply if the conversations are happening in private DMs, but that’s a matter of team culture. You have to be intentional in a remote setting, just the same as you do in an office setting. But if you are it can work very well in my experience, perhaps even better than in person.
  - carlmr 2y ago
    >The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. IME a lot of the really useful "in earshot range" conversations are those that were intended privately but were overheard by someone that has an idea. Engineer A might go to engineer B to ask B on how to do X. B is being asked because they are usually knowledgeable about similar topics. In this case they don't know. In slack A would message B directly. B answers that they don't know. In the office C might overhear it and have an idea and chime in. I think this unintentional broadcasting can be really helpful to productivity and spreading ideas. It just doesn't work so well in a messaging app.
- consteval 2y ago
  > Conversations that used to happen in ear reach Sorry, is this a real thing? I've never experienced this. We all have cubes and sure, maybe sometimes I can hear someone kind of close to me. But not very often. And typically, people actually speak in a low voice as to not disturb others. We have many floors in the office too, so all our meetings are on Teams. I can't remember the last time I went to a conference room. I actually really enjoy the async nature of chats. Because you can come and go in the conversation, and you don't have to grind everything you're doing to a halt. Plus, I can go back later and refresh my memory.
teractiveodular 2y ago
I think the real pain comes from many managers discovering that if they're going to have remote workers, might as well go whole hog and hire them in Bangalore for 1/10th the price instead of paying SV salaries.
- ok_dad 2y ago
  That’ll cause real pain for the management. Unless you pay near western market rates, you’re getting the bottom of the barrel in India or anywhere else, much like if you tried to hire US developers for even 50% of the market rate. The low priced contractors do such poor work it’s almost not useful.
  - orwin 2y ago
    Or they'll get hired, get taught really basic shit (chmod/chown) on the job, get a cisco/AWS certificate then leave 6 month later to join a better paying job.
    - jrs235 2y ago
      But not before misapplying chmod/chown settings in your environment.
      - orwin 2y ago
        In my first job we loaned Hadoop clusters that we either managed ourselves or let the client manage the IT. One of our client decided to use a contractor instead (I might miss details, it was almost 10 year ago) . The day after configuring the cluster and giving him the metaphorical keys, we saw low-level alert on one computer in that cluster, some monitoring daemon couldn't be reached but nothing really concerning (could still be pinged, no issues with the virtualisation). We still tried to look at it, but could't ssh on the computer (which explains why our daemons couldn't be reached). We contacted the client, said basically: 'we can remove the monitoring and our access keys if you want, but please tell us before you do this. Do you want it done on the other computers?'. He came back the day after that saying basically 'what?' then talking about a shard that couldn't be reached (he was nice about it). Turns out, 'chmod 777 /' is the dumbest way of breaking your workstation I've ever seen. We all hear about 'rm -rf /' but let's be real, no one has ever done it, not outside of school at least. Chmod 777 / because you couldn't manage to understand a Java stacktrace has 100% been done in a professional environment: I had to fix it. Luckily you can copy the permissions of filesystem A onto filesystem B (can't remember how, but it was easy) so the fix didn't involve any reinstallation and Hadoop wizardry.
steveBK123 2y ago
Really depends on your org structure. If you already had a global org, then it was already running poorly due to bad VC hardware and inability to book conference leading to lots of drive-by chats. Great for the office which has >40% of the staff in it, bad for the 3 other offices with 20%. Hybrid/remote/zoom leveled the playing field so that our non-primary-HQ devs were able to fully contribute whereas in many cases they were bodies in seat for follow-the-sun coverage who would do rote Jiras assigned to them.

by ern 2y ago

nox101 2y ago

I see the opposite. Conversations that used to happen in ear reach so I'd know what was going on with various team members and be able to contribute when I knew a solution are now conversation that happen in private chat or private VC. Productivity is way down. Even more interesting, a team lead lives in another country 6 times zones away. Some times they visit the main office for 1-2 weeks. Productivity shoots through the roof those weeks.

ok_dad 2y ago
Well yea, when I go on a work trip I tend to work a lot more those weeks because I’m not home. That doesn’t mean productivity during those two weeks are representative of normal.
- DAGdug 2y ago
  It’s the local team, not the traveling team lead, that’s being spoken of here.
  - hnlmorg 2y ago
    It’s the same root cause. If there are foreign workers in town for a week then the whole team will often work around the visitors schedule.
Olreich 2y ago
Sounds like you need a group chat that people are willing to talk in. If that isn’t happening, then there’s a barrier to doing it that you need to resolve. Could be they’re fine with you listening in, but not the manager. Could be something else. Fix that, and get back to productive remotely.
munksbeer 2y ago
That's a shame. We're a mostly remote workplace with very high productivity. Hopefully you can figure out how to make it work, or move to a place that suits you better.
NeutralCrane 2y ago
That doesn’t seem like a sustainable alternative. In the case you are describing, the productivity boost is highly dependent on actually having the right people within ear reach. You are relying on the right people happening to hear other conversations. What if your team is large, so that even if you are all in office, the chances of stumbling into the right conversation is lower? What if you are grabbing lunch, or in the bathroom, or meeting with someone else when that conversation is happening? The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. That way, everyone can contribute to the conversation, it’s asynchronous so you don’t have to be in exactly the right place and right time to participate, and people can go back and review details very easily if needed. You are right that that doesn’t apply if the conversations are happening in private DMs, but that’s a matter of team culture. You have to be intentional in a remote setting, just the same as you do in an office setting. But if you are it can work very well in my experience, perhaps even better than in person.
- carlmr 2y ago
  >The most effective solution in my experience has been when working remote, and having a culture where a team has open discussions on their own Slack channel, with threads for particular conversations. IME a lot of the really useful "in earshot range" conversations are those that were intended privately but were overheard by someone that has an idea. Engineer A might go to engineer B to ask B on how to do X. B is being asked because they are usually knowledgeable about similar topics. In this case they don't know. In slack A would message B directly. B answers that they don't know. In the office C might overhear it and have an idea and chime in. I think this unintentional broadcasting can be really helpful to productivity and spreading ideas. It just doesn't work so well in a messaging app.
consteval 2y ago
> Conversations that used to happen in ear reach Sorry, is this a real thing? I've never experienced this. We all have cubes and sure, maybe sometimes I can hear someone kind of close to me. But not very often. And typically, people actually speak in a low voice as to not disturb others. We have many floors in the office too, so all our meetings are on Teams. I can't remember the last time I went to a conference room. I actually really enjoy the async nature of chats. Because you can come and go in the conversation, and you don't have to grind everything you're doing to a halt. Plus, I can go back later and refresh my memory.

teractiveodular 2y ago

I think the real pain comes from many managers discovering that if they're going to have remote workers, might as well go whole hog and hire them in Bangalore for 1/10th the price instead of paying SV salaries.

ok_dad 2y ago
That’ll cause real pain for the management. Unless you pay near western market rates, you’re getting the bottom of the barrel in India or anywhere else, much like if you tried to hire US developers for even 50% of the market rate. The low priced contractors do such poor work it’s almost not useful.
- orwin 2y ago
  Or they'll get hired, get taught really basic shit (chmod/chown) on the job, get a cisco/AWS certificate then leave 6 month later to join a better paying job.
  - jrs235 2y ago
    But not before misapplying chmod/chown settings in your environment.
    - orwin 2y ago
      In my first job we loaned Hadoop clusters that we either managed ourselves or let the client manage the IT. One of our client decided to use a contractor instead (I might miss details, it was almost 10 year ago) . The day after configuring the cluster and giving him the metaphorical keys, we saw low-level alert on one computer in that cluster, some monitoring daemon couldn't be reached but nothing really concerning (could still be pinged, no issues with the virtualisation). We still tried to look at it, but could't ssh on the computer (which explains why our daemons couldn't be reached). We contacted the client, said basically: 'we can remove the monitoring and our access keys if you want, but please tell us before you do this. Do you want it done on the other computers?'. He came back the day after that saying basically 'what?' then talking about a shard that couldn't be reached (he was nice about it). Turns out, 'chmod 777 /' is the dumbest way of breaking your workstation I've ever seen. We all hear about 'rm -rf /' but let's be real, no one has ever done it, not outside of school at least. Chmod 777 / because you couldn't manage to understand a Java stacktrace has 100% been done in a professional environment: I had to fix it. Luckily you can copy the permissions of filesystem A onto filesystem B (can't remember how, but it was easy) so the fix didn't involve any reinstallation and Hadoop wizardry.

steveBK123 2y ago

Really depends on your org structure. If you already had a global org, then it was already running poorly due to bad VC hardware and inability to book conference leading to lots of drive-by chats. Great for the office which has >40% of the staff in it, bad for the 3 other offices with 20%. Hybrid/remote/zoom leveled the playing field so that our non-primary-HQ devs were able to fully contribute whereas in many cases they were bodies in seat for follow-the-sun coverage who would do rote Jiras assigned to them.