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This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing no

This is where remote work goes off the rails, but then it’s wild how intentionally isolating the implementation of RTO that many large corporations are doing now. They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t. It’s the worst of both worlds.

lionkor 2y ago
That sounds awful. I go to the office to chat with everyone, it's incredible how much work gets done when you can just walk over to someone and debug or rubbery ducky in real time.
- Tabular-Iceberg 2y ago
  Yes. I got fired from that place for being too negative and now work somewhere much more sane. The CEO to his credit went on a campaign to improve the culture, but middle management obstinately refused to change a single thing. I recently heard he got fired by the board too, go figure.
  - stitched2gethr 2y ago
    Remote work did a number on middle management. When many of them realized that if they aren't the strategic brain at the top, and they aren't individual contributers, and they can supervise butts in chais, then they aren't actually providing that much value.
    - firoso 2y ago
      So adapt. Learn to curate your team and their work. Lead by helping people organize, getting obstacles out of their way, shielding them from alarmist BS from higher management, and stop worrying about butts in seats. Focus on agreements, goals, commitments, accountability, growth, and coaching. It's not that hard.
- hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
  Everybody is different. When I visit the office sometimes, I do it to socialize and talk about things not related to work mainly. And then I get back to do the actual work. If I need to communicate with someone, I simply ask them for their time - they can get back to me whenever they are free. This system serves me and my coworkers well but it's obvious there are many people who prefer synchronous in-person communication for most tasks.
  - lionkor 2y ago
    I don't prefer the in-person communication personally, but I know it's more productive for me, so I do it and end up preferring it. The same way I prefer clean code; it makes my and the companies life easier. Makes more money. I'm German, and it's painfully obvious.
anshumankmr 2y ago
Yeah I spent 2 hours in commute to attend Teams calls.. yay?
saghm 2y ago
> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t. Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.
- erikerikson 2y ago
  Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour. It may be beneficial to the company to save overall "company time" at expense of wasting time for many individual employees, but I don't think this analysis accounts for the costs of people leaving or being fired. Both of those are very costly, but they're step changes and hard to attribute to any specific cause.
    - erikerikson 2y ago
      I've been evaluated half yearly or annually, never hourly that I've known. Do you work in HR?
      - tanjtanjtanj 2y ago
        The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour. Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? Jira/Github statistics? These are not things that do not reflect a salaried worker's output but you're still getting evaluated by them on an minute by minute, hour by hour, day by ay basis.
suzzer99 2y ago
Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.
- szszrk 2y ago
  I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course. And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension... Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers. I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.
- swader999 2y ago
  Volunteer for something your interested in locally on the side. It's the only way I stay sane.
- darkwater 2y ago
  Bingo if you are in your late 20s or early 30s. But then life and priorities change...
- roland35 2y ago
  I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team. When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.
pydry 2y ago
It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO. Ive worked in: 1) collaborative in office 2) uncollaborative in office 3) collaborative wfh 4) uncollaborative wfh Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better. 1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall. After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO. I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.
- AbstractH24 2y ago
  The trouble with 3 is that while achievable, it requires an incredibly high degree of intentionality and strong leadership.
  - pydry 2y ago
    1 and 3 both do.
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      Certainly But the bar is even higher for 3 than 1 and likelihood of it occurring organically lower.
  - drzaiusx11 2y ago
    i don’t see how leadership has anything to do with it, at least any more than any other collaborating members of the team. all parties need “good enough” communication skills, which can be learned (to an extent). poor communication skills regardless of in office or remote will tank a project and if systemic, a company
    - AbstractH24 2y ago
      Because in a fully remote environment it is easy to default to having transactional relationships and only when a job responsibility requires them. Just like I do with a customer service rep. You don’t see your coworkers in the hall, overhear them talking to their kid, or talk while working. Certainly don’t by default interact with folks who work in parallel. Not saying that in office means these things will certainly occur. But because by default these interactions don’t occur, the likelihood of them happening organically is quite low.
whatnow37373 2y ago
The commute isn’t paid, so who cares. Let them drive 4 hours a day. But don’t you dare stealing a few minutes in idle talk, because yes, not being valuable every second you are on company premises is stealing. You should feel bad. Now put on your headphones and work through your task list, you miserable ant.
swader999 2y ago
Meh, we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the AI managers take over. Keystroke, app usage, bugs, velocity, eye tracking, stool samples... All logged and dash boarded in real time.
- LadyCailin 2y ago
  “Privacy regulations aren’t important, because I have nothing to hide.”
- eru 2y ago
  If the AI is any good, it won't need the stool samples: it can infer all that data well enough just from your webcam.
- Tabular-Iceberg 2y ago
  The real value of AI is if they could make one that is capable of looking at dashboards. So much time is wasted making dashboards that nobody cares enough to look at.
AbstractH24 2y ago
As much as I dislike the isolation of WFH, particularly since leaving the job I had pre-2020 that began in office and started doing fractional work at fully remote companies, I keep reminding myself that offices aren’t what they used to be. Also, the kind of relationships I had in office as a 25 year old grinding it out on a sales floor aren’t going to be the ones I’d find as a 35 year old in revenue operations.
dep_b 2y ago
God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit. Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it. Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in. I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?
- Qwertious 2y ago
  You can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the tiger.
goda90 2y ago
My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO. But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to chat in person, etc were all encouraged. Holding a meeting over Teams when everyone was in office became almost a taboo. Even team building activities and events saw an increase in frequency.
- jvanderbot 2y ago
  I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to. In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time. That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling someone from their flow to ask for help. And otherwise being around a bunch of hard workers helped build motivation. It just doesn't translate though. No work environment I've experienced recreated that spirit of autonomy and esprit de corps. Instead you get open offices and a ton of "calls" and meetings subdividing time. Add in some boss standing over your shoulder and you bet I'll take my basement office over that any time.
  - leoqa 2y ago
    I experienced this environment a few times: when I was in school in the CS lab, when I was working at AWS on a research team building a database and when I was working at a startup (early days, like 5 people). The startup scaled to 100s and we lost the spirit. Since then, it's been FANG with no spirit and now I've been WFH for 5 years, effectively stuck in a covid lifestyle. Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.
  - perrygeo 2y ago
    I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm. I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here. It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful. At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.
mr_toad 2y ago
I pretty sure that Teams has tanked productivity in some offices. It used to be that arranging a meeting required finding a physical space. Now some people are spending their days in back-to-back teams meetings and never get any actual work done.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for. I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something sorted and then end the call. Boom. done. The same in a physical meeting would have been a huge time suck. Having said that. I like being in the office because there are tons of coffee room and hallway conversations that would not have happened if WFH, but were actually really beneficial to keeping everyone informed about whats happening.
  - chubot 2y ago
    People used to have phone calls for this! It was on the way out even 15 years ago, but a simple telephone call can get people unblocked pretty efficiently
  - Tabular-Iceberg 2y ago
    But then Teams will only let you book calls that start and end at the hour and half hour, making everything either back-to-back or with gaps too long for breaks and too short for focus work. Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?
    - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
      Teams does have the same time booking quanta as physical rooms, but (at least in my experience), the expectation and norms around a teams call is to end when your done and sign off. Whereas in a meeting room you get the "ok, so that's resolved. We have the room for another 25minutes, so what else is going on with everyone?" kind of vibe and we all stay there for the full time block.
mrbluecoat 2y ago
I work far more effectively remotely in isolation. The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.
- firoso 2y ago
  I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office. Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.
firoso 2y ago
I am ADHD. I work remotely. My productivity went up substantially after leaving the open office. Body doubling is one of many tools, and it is not a required one. I do however often livestream my coding work in an open teams chat meeting and hang out with others im working with relatively often.

lionkor 2y ago

That sounds awful. I go to the office to chat with everyone, it's incredible how much work gets done when you can just walk over to someone and debug or rubbery ducky in real time.

Tabular-Iceberg 2y ago
Yes. I got fired from that place for being too negative and now work somewhere much more sane. The CEO to his credit went on a campaign to improve the culture, but middle management obstinately refused to change a single thing. I recently heard he got fired by the board too, go figure.
- stitched2gethr 2y ago
  Remote work did a number on middle management. When many of them realized that if they aren't the strategic brain at the top, and they aren't individual contributers, and they can supervise butts in chais, then they aren't actually providing that much value.
  - firoso 2y ago
    So adapt. Learn to curate your team and their work. Lead by helping people organize, getting obstacles out of their way, shielding them from alarmist BS from higher management, and stop worrying about butts in seats. Focus on agreements, goals, commitments, accountability, growth, and coaching. It's not that hard.
hdjjhhvvhga 2y ago
Everybody is different. When I visit the office sometimes, I do it to socialize and talk about things not related to work mainly. And then I get back to do the actual work. If I need to communicate with someone, I simply ask them for their time - they can get back to me whenever they are free. This system serves me and my coworkers well but it's obvious there are many people who prefer synchronous in-person communication for most tasks.
- lionkor 2y ago
  I don't prefer the in-person communication personally, but I know it's more productive for me, so I do it and end up preferring it. The same way I prefer clean code; it makes my and the companies life easier. Makes more money. I'm German, and it's painfully obvious.

anshumankmr 2y ago

Yeah I spent 2 hours in commute to attend Teams calls.. yay?

saghm 2y ago

> They line people up in rows, put headphones on their heads and wire them up to Teams and Jira to spend the whole day in isolation. Because taking a walk to another floor of building to talk to someone like a normal human being is too wasteful, but somehow forcing everyone to spend hours commuting isn’t. Sure, this is pretty much exactly what I'd expect from companies; wasting the employee's time doesn't matter, but wasting the _company's_ time is anathema. In the absence of something to push back against it, companies will always make decisions like this. We're only a bit over a century and a few repealed regulations from another Triangle Shirtwaist Factory after all.

erikerikson 2y ago
Except we're largely talking about salaried employees who aren't paid by the hour.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  They may not be paid by the hour, but they're being graded by the hour. It may be beneficial to the company to save overall "company time" at expense of wasting time for many individual employees, but I don't think this analysis accounts for the costs of people leaving or being fired. Both of those are very costly, but they're step changes and hard to attribute to any specific cause.
  - erikerikson 2y ago
    I've been evaluated half yearly or annually, never hourly that I've known. Do you work in HR?
    - tanjtanjtanj 2y ago
      The above poster was fairly obviously using a figure of speech, they did not mean that there was a specific formal evaluation like a mid-year review every hour. Think about what the average salaried person (especially outside of tech) might get dinged on either explicitly or implicitly. Come in at 10:00 every day? Not being "seen" enough in your seat or around the office? Not replying quickly enough in Teams/slack? Jira/Github statistics? These are not things that do not reflect a salaried worker's output but you're still getting evaluated by them on an minute by minute, hour by hour, day by ay basis.

suzzer99 2y ago

Working in an open office on cool stuff with legitimate friends was the best work experience I've ever had by far. Most days it didn't even feel like work. Now I wfh full time with people who are just coworkers and I'm miserable.

szszrk 2y ago
I feel a bit like that, when we in the team started to introduce agile practices. Corporate agile practices, of course. And while some of those aspects are important and we sucked at it, we are also stripping away any relation we had with each other. Insight into what we really struggle with, releasing tension... Twist is that it's driven by youngest team members and they love it, because that's what they did in past jobs. So we cut some meetings time, but now we have no idea what we are doing and need more meetings ;) Incentive to actually be on the same page dropped, we are becoming strangers. I still struggle if I should keep trying to fix that or if it's just "going upstream" and will make me seen as problem maker.
TeMPOraL 2y ago
That's the core aspect of my open-office experience too. Working together on cool stuff with legitimate friends? Best thing ever. Take away even one of {together, cool stuff, legitimate friends} - just a single thing - and open-office instantly becomes psychological torture for me, because for some reason, my mind parses this as feeling under threat, and gives me large amount of anxiety to deal with.
swader999 2y ago
Volunteer for something your interested in locally on the side. It's the only way I stay sane.
darkwater 2y ago
Bingo if you are in your late 20s or early 30s. But then life and priorities change...
roland35 2y ago
I also had a fun experience in an open office, but the key element of it was that the office was only about 15-20 people and we were all on the same project and team. When I visited the Big Tech office (as a remote employee), it was an entire floor with rows of unrelated people all together. My team was together but it felt much different, more distracting, and hard to have a conversation without feeling like you are bothering other people.

pydry 2y ago

It's about maintaining a feeling of control, it's not about collaboration. Thats just the lie they tell to RTO. Ive worked in: 1) collaborative in office 2) uncollaborative in office 3) collaborative wfh 4) uncollaborative wfh Personally i found 4 to be the most tortuous (because of ADHD), but 2 isnt much better. 1 and 3 i think are roughly equally good while you're there but wfh has so many ancillary benefits like not commuting that it wins overall. After experiencing 4 and before I experienced 3 I actually desperately wanted to RTO. I think a collaborative environment is only quite tangentially related to inhabiting the same space, though. It's more about culture, trust and shared goals.

AbstractH24 2y ago
The trouble with 3 is that while achievable, it requires an incredibly high degree of intentionality and strong leadership.
- pydry 2y ago
  1 and 3 both do.
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    Certainly But the bar is even higher for 3 than 1 and likelihood of it occurring organically lower.
- drzaiusx11 2y ago
  i don’t see how leadership has anything to do with it, at least any more than any other collaborating members of the team. all parties need “good enough” communication skills, which can be learned (to an extent). poor communication skills regardless of in office or remote will tank a project and if systemic, a company
  - AbstractH24 2y ago
    Because in a fully remote environment it is easy to default to having transactional relationships and only when a job responsibility requires them. Just like I do with a customer service rep. You don’t see your coworkers in the hall, overhear them talking to their kid, or talk while working. Certainly don’t by default interact with folks who work in parallel. Not saying that in office means these things will certainly occur. But because by default these interactions don’t occur, the likelihood of them happening organically is quite low.

whatnow37373 2y ago

The commute isn’t paid, so who cares. Let them drive 4 hours a day. But don’t you dare stealing a few minutes in idle talk, because yes, not being valuable every second you are on company premises is stealing. You should feel bad. Now put on your headphones and work through your task list, you miserable ant.

swader999 2y ago

Meh, we haven't seen anything yet. Just wait till the AI managers take over. Keystroke, app usage, bugs, velocity, eye tracking, stool samples... All logged and dash boarded in real time.

LadyCailin 2y ago
“Privacy regulations aren’t important, because I have nothing to hide.”
eru 2y ago
If the AI is any good, it won't need the stool samples: it can infer all that data well enough just from your webcam.
Tabular-Iceberg 2y ago
The real value of AI is if they could make one that is capable of looking at dashboards. So much time is wasted making dashboards that nobody cares enough to look at.

AbstractH24 2y ago

As much as I dislike the isolation of WFH, particularly since leaving the job I had pre-2020 that began in office and started doing fractional work at fully remote companies, I keep reminding myself that offices aren’t what they used to be. Also, the kind of relationships I had in office as a 25 year old grinding it out on a sales floor aren’t going to be the ones I’d find as a 35 year old in revenue operations.

dep_b 2y ago

God yes. I’ve spent 8 years working remote before the pandemic hit. Only after that I started coming into offices again because my local freelance customers demanded it. Spent most days looking at a bunch of nerds with headphones, being ignored until lunch. I had to drag people out of their cocoons to have conversations. Nobody had any collaboration lined up the days I came in. I mean I see the collaboration thing, but most teams are more autistic working in-office than I was working remote. Apparently I was the only person reaching to other people all the time?

Qwertious 2y ago
You can take the tiger out of the jungle, but you can't take the jungle out of the tiger.

goda90 2y ago

My employer was very quick to force return to office after covid lockdowns. Like they were willing to pour millions into subdividing offices into closets so people could isolate at work even, but the county health department gave them a stern look and they ended up scraping that and waiting another year to force RTO. But they actually put their money where their mouth is. Ad-hoc conversations in the hallway, going to chat in person, etc were all encouraged. Holding a meeting over Teams when everyone was in office became almost a taboo. Even team building activities and events saw an increase in frequency.

jvanderbot 2y ago
I would love an offline only work environment. Just a small cadre of tech obsessed smart folks working in a room and talking when they need to. In grad school we did this. Everyone was heads down, except when they were stumped they'd go to the whiteboard, which was open invitation to discuss a problem, if you had time. That kind of "opt in" / volunteering help was way more trust building and low pressure than pulling someone from their flow to ask for help. And otherwise being around a bunch of hard workers helped build motivation. It just doesn't translate though. No work environment I've experienced recreated that spirit of autonomy and esprit de corps. Instead you get open offices and a ton of "calls" and meetings subdividing time. Add in some boss standing over your shoulder and you bet I'll take my basement office over that any time.
- leoqa 2y ago
  I experienced this environment a few times: when I was in school in the CS lab, when I was working at AWS on a research team building a database and when I was working at a startup (early days, like 5 people). The startup scaled to 100s and we lost the spirit. Since then, it's been FANG with no spirit and now I've been WFH for 5 years, effectively stuck in a covid lifestyle. Would love to return to offline only, 20 people max environment that paid the bills without worrying about implosion.
- perrygeo 2y ago
  I agree. Those offline jobs are highly productive and fun. I'd like to think they still exist somewhere. They did 15 years ago. But I'm afraid a whole generation of software professionals is growing up without ever experiencing it, just taking the current state of the industry as the norm. I like the way you frame it as an "offline only" work environment. Offline vs online does seem to be the main distinction here. It's not the remoteness. It's the apps and the intellectually-lazy culture they encourage. Slack, Jira, Github, Docs, Sheets, etc. So much of modern work is navigating those byzantine digital games to score virtual communication points, rather than actually communicating anything of value. Being terminally online is almost guaranteed to lead to presence monitoring, stilted communication, territoriality, lack of clarity, poor product quality and dehumanization. It can happen remotely, it can happen in the office. Doesn't matter. The app-ification of all communication lines is what's harmful. At some point, you need to stop with the digital games and just use your brain. Commit to the deep work of communicating. There are a shocking number of people who would rather shuffle tickets around all day than read or write a single coherent paragraph. Thinking in slack responses and Jira tickets is a symptom of brain rot.

mr_toad 2y ago

I pretty sure that Teams has tanked productivity in some offices. It used to be that arranging a meeting required finding a physical space. Now some people are spending their days in back-to-back teams meetings and never get any actual work done.

Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
The counter to this is that you can actually have a 5 or 10 minute teams call which was all that was needed to resolve the issue / answer the question / or whatever the meeting was about. Whereas, if it was a physical meeting in a booked room then it would easily expand to fill 30 or 60min or whatever time the room was booked for. I see this myself. I get a teams call with a manager and a few others, get something sorted and then end the call. Boom. done. The same in a physical meeting would have been a huge time suck. Having said that. I like being in the office because there are tons of coffee room and hallway conversations that would not have happened if WFH, but were actually really beneficial to keeping everyone informed about whats happening.
- chubot 2y ago
  People used to have phone calls for this! It was on the way out even 15 years ago, but a simple telephone call can get people unblocked pretty efficiently
- Tabular-Iceberg 2y ago
  But then Teams will only let you book calls that start and end at the hour and half hour, making everything either back-to-back or with gaps too long for breaks and too short for focus work. Teams goes out of its way to create colossal amounts of waste by design. Cui bono?
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    Teams does have the same time booking quanta as physical rooms, but (at least in my experience), the expectation and norms around a teams call is to end when your done and sign off. Whereas in a meeting room you get the "ok, so that's resolved. We have the room for another 25minutes, so what else is going on with everyone?" kind of vibe and we all stay there for the full time block.

mrbluecoat 2y ago

I work far more effectively remotely in isolation. The article is specifically about those with ADD/ADHD, not a generalization.

firoso 2y ago
I have ADHD. I doubled my productivity going remote and working from a well curated home office. Charging station for my phone just inside the room, good sitting/standing desk and chair, good laptop, with a dock, 3 displays. A desktop with a vertical monitor I use for teams chat, technical documents, and work management only. Second laptop used for secure prod access tucked under a monitor riser until needed. Whiteboard. Couch with a small station for engineering journaling. I also take video calls from the couch often. Treadmill and elliptical, TV for watching YouTube tech videos while I'm taking a fitness break, bookshelves for my collected engineering journals and useful books. Roughly 275 sqft. Virtual body doubling helps sometimes but is hardly needed.

firoso 2y ago

I am ADHD. I work remotely. My productivity went up substantially after leaving the open office. Body doubling is one of many tools, and it is not a required one. I do however often livestream my coding work in an open teams chat meeting and hang out with others im working with relatively often.