Amazon Defends Decision to Require Employees in the Office 3 Days a Week (geekwire.com) 173
The Washington Post reports that Amazon has over 1 million workers worldwide — and they want most of them to be back in the office at least three days a week:
In a note to employees, chief executive Andy Jassy said that the length of the pandemic had given senior managers time to observe what workplace models work best. They concluded that being in person most of the time had distinct benefits, allowing employees to more easily share ideas, collaborate, train new hires and connect. "Invention is often sloppy. It wanders and meanders and marinates," Jassy wrote. "Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in-person than virtually."
Amazon is just the latest major company to adopt some version of a return-to-work policy that requires workers to show up at the office for a certain number of days. Walt Disney Co. recently told its staffers to appear in the office four days a week. The Washington Post requires workers based in D.C. to report to headquarters three days a week....
Earlier this month, data tracked by Kastle Systems said 50 percent of workers were now back at their desks — and some experts think that's as high as it will go.
GeekWire notes that Apple has already asked employees to come in three days a week, something Google also expects from most of its staff. GeekWire's article adds that local business organizations applauded Amazon's move, with the Bellevue Chamber, calling it "extraordinary news for the health and vitality in downtown." And the site also reports the various reasons Amazon's senior executives gave for favoring employees-in-the-office at least three days a week: "It's easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we're in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues."
"Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we're in person. The energy and riffing on one another's ideas happen more freely."
"Learning from one another is easier in-person. Being able to walk a few feet to somebody's space and ask them how to do something or how they've handled a particular situation is much easier than Chiming or Slacking them."
"Teams tend to be better connected to one another when they see each other in person more frequently."
That thinking doubles down on a mindset that Jassy expressed before he took over as CEO in 2021 from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Jassy said in March 2021 that "invention" is hard to do virtually compared to people brainstorming together in person. "You just don't riff the same way," he said at the time, "so it's really changed the way that we've had to think about how we drive innovation, and how we solicit information from our builders and the types of meetings that we run."
Jassy said there will be a small minority of exceptions to the new return-to-office requirement and that Amazon plans to implement the change effective May 1.
The move takes effect May 1st.
Amazon is just the latest major company to adopt some version of a return-to-work policy that requires workers to show up at the office for a certain number of days. Walt Disney Co. recently told its staffers to appear in the office four days a week. The Washington Post requires workers based in D.C. to report to headquarters three days a week....
Earlier this month, data tracked by Kastle Systems said 50 percent of workers were now back at their desks — and some experts think that's as high as it will go.
GeekWire notes that Apple has already asked employees to come in three days a week, something Google also expects from most of its staff. GeekWire's article adds that local business organizations applauded Amazon's move, with the Bellevue Chamber, calling it "extraordinary news for the health and vitality in downtown." And the site also reports the various reasons Amazon's senior executives gave for favoring employees-in-the-office at least three days a week: "It's easier to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture when we're in the office together most of the time and surrounded by our colleagues."
"Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we're in person. The energy and riffing on one another's ideas happen more freely."
"Learning from one another is easier in-person. Being able to walk a few feet to somebody's space and ask them how to do something or how they've handled a particular situation is much easier than Chiming or Slacking them."
"Teams tend to be better connected to one another when they see each other in person more frequently."
That thinking doubles down on a mindset that Jassy expressed before he took over as CEO in 2021 from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Jassy said in March 2021 that "invention" is hard to do virtually compared to people brainstorming together in person. "You just don't riff the same way," he said at the time, "so it's really changed the way that we've had to think about how we drive innovation, and how we solicit information from our builders and the types of meetings that we run."
Jassy said there will be a small minority of exceptions to the new return-to-office requirement and that Amazon plans to implement the change effective May 1.
The move takes effect May 1st.
Probably personality dependent (Score:5, Interesting)
I personally never had trouble being productive remotely, but perhaps extrovert personalities, the bulk of who are over represented at the higher management levels, need more face time. Seems like a personality flaw to me. I also wonder how much of this is political pressure on companies because of how much remote work impacted local businesses. Has anyone out there actually have a 'serendipity' moment at the 'water cooler?' Never happened to me and I've been working since the mid 90's but again I'm introvert personality style and really don't get anything out of 'hanging out' with coworkers. I find it draining not invigorating. But my BFF is the opposite, he's very gregarious and talks about how his house is basically a community center. Works for him.
Re:Probably personality dependent (Score:5, Insightful)
I personally never had trouble being productive remotely...
If your work doesn't require collaboration, that's possible. Or if your work is with an already-established team, where everybody knows their role, and you just receive your part from one person, add your part, and pass it along to another person.
If you're starting a new project where people do have to work together, though, being co-located helps. And if it requires a lot of drawing sketches and scribbling equations, really the collaboration tools aren't as good as a pad of paper or a dry-erase board.
(Remote work also works better for people whose skills are in written communication.)
Re: Probably personality dependent (Score:3)
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I have shipped 6 successful video games with crews of people I never met in person. A cross disciplinary team of 20 to 30 people. If we werenâ(TM)t collaborating, the what were we doing?
Writing code.
Hard to believe, but most work does not involve writing code.
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Hard to believe, but most work does not involve writing code.
Then let those people go into the office and talk about whatever they need to talk about.
Re:Probably personality dependent (Score:5, Insightful)
Collaboration is very important unless the role is very tightly constrained. At one job most of the technical debt and lousy design essentially came from passing out features to people and having them work on it alone with no interactions, and the result was a mess. I'd give examples but it's pushing my buttons and I have to remind myself to calm down, it can't hurt me anymore... Working this way means you can have a team of geniuses and end up with a crappy end product; but since no team is full of geniuses it will be worse than that.
People are just fine working remotely (Score:5, Insightful)
Back in my old town the local fast food restaurants spent years blocking a highway bypass so that workers would have to drive past their fast food restaurants. As an added bonus to long commute meant you were probably too tired to go home and cook
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the local fast food restaurants spent years blocking a highway bypass
I wonder if that's why I-70/I-76 in PA don't connect, either. We are forced to take a 1/4 mile trip through traffic lights to continue onward even though most of the bypass was built. The short stretch through the local town (and past the restaurants and gas stations) remains.
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the local fast food restaurants spent years blocking a highway bypass
I wonder if that's why I-70/I-76 in PA don't connect, either. We are forced to take a 1/4 mile trip through traffic lights to continue onward even though most of the bypass was built. The short stretch through the local town (and past the restaurants and gas stations) remains.
Because I-76 is the turnpike. It's sole purpose is to move people and goods from one end of the Commonwealth to the other. Other roads feed into it.
As for that bypass, when was the last time you saw road construction/repair get completed in PA?
Re:Probably personality dependent (Score:5, Interesting)
"When you’re in-person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated."
If your career depends on subtle social cues and building relationships, getting into the "old boy's club", then being in the office is important. You need to signal your value to the hierarchy. This is true of a lot of managers.
If your career depends on actually being productive, and your social signaling is mainly based on delivering completed work, then being in the office might slow you down.
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"cultural cues" is code for "pretend to be willing to slob someone's knob, while secretly plotting to stab them in the back".
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How to be productive [Re:Probably personality...] (Score:5, Insightful)
..If your career depends on actually being productive...
For many jobs, "actually being productive" requires working with other people.
/., however is a community in which people working by writing code alone are over-represented, and many of them can't even conceptualize that there exists productive work which is not best done by hiding away from the world,
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For someone who claims interpersonal skills are important, you sure are bad at understanding what people are saying.
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How is it a strawman? It's a literally true statement. This site is populated by a significantly larger portion of programmers than most other sites, and those people routinely make note of how they don't like dealing with people or being in meetings.
That there might be others who either need to or enjoy interacting with others is anatema to them. It's not something which enters into their mindset.
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How is it a strawman? It's a literally true statement. This site is populated by a significantly larger portion of programmers than most other sites
A strawman is intentionally misrepresenting someone's position. If I say, "Your post is wrong because water is wet," then that is a true statement, but it's still a strawman (or non sequitur). It doesn't matter that water is wet.
In that poster's case, he was saying "being productive requires working with other people." No one ever said it didn't. That wasn't the point. Thus, a strawman. He was arguing against nobody.
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A strawman is intentionally misrepresenting someone's position. If I say, "Your post is wrong because water is wet," then that is a true statement, but it's still a strawman (or non sequitur). It doesn't matter that water is wet.
Liquid water is not itself wet, but can make other solid materials wet.
Example of remote failure[Re:How to be productive] (Score:2)
For someone who claims interpersonal skills are important, you sure are bad at understanding what people are saying.
What I said is that in-person interactions make it much easier than remote at understanding what people are saying.
If you're saying that I failed to understand what a person (you) who I never met face-to-face said in a remote, text-only format...
yes, that was my point.
(and, for what it's worth, I still have no idea what it is you think I misunderstood. Clearly you are not very good at remote interactions.)
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Considering you were replying to a post that was literally discussing jobs where social cues are valuable, your post was false, out of place, and a strawman all in one.
What he said [Re:Example of remote failure] (Score:2)
Considering you were replying to a post that was literally discussing jobs where social cues are valuable, your post was false, out of place, and a strawman all in one.
Nope. The post you're referring to (four posts upthread, fwiw) that I was replying to said that there are jobs where social clues are valuable, but these are different from the jobs that "depend on actually being productive."
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You're in every damn thread here. So what company do you manage?
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Then have those people sniff each other's farts and let us continue to work in peace. It's just so win-win.
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Translation: The workers don't feed my ego when I drone for hours on end about myself and they work instead of listening!
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The thing is that nobody but him gives a fuck about it. I don't care where I stand in some arbitrary hierarchy.
I ask for 150k in a business that routinely pays 200k and more. You think you can fire me with impunity just because according to some arbitrary hierarchy you're my superior. Think again when YOUR superior learns that you've just fired his best worker that he gets for 50k below market value.
You would not be the first "superior" I had that I got fired.
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It's not subtle social cues. Sometimes glaring social cues: ie, in the in-person meetings you can SEE when the key person is ignoring everyone else and staring at their laptop. Sometimes you have to say "Bob, this is your feature we're talking about" before he shuts the laptop. Other times the team has been so bad you start forbidding laptops at the meetings if you're not presenting. Working from home this gets worse; there's less to prevent you from multitasking, and it's not at all uncommon for questio
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If no one knows your value, then how do you think they know your value enough to keep paying you?
Oh fuck off. If you think my value is because of my blue eyes and tall stature, then I don't want to work for you. Value in software engineering isn't established by social cues.
IF you can't tell whether my work is valuable or not by looking at my work, then you have no business being a manager.
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If you think my value is because of my blue eyes and tall stature, then I don't want to work for you.
Wow you went from zero to accusing a Jew of being really into that whole ubermensch aesthetic in record time! I applaud your dedication to unexpected Godwinning.
Value in software engineering isn't established by social cues.
Engineering is not science or mathematics or art. It can certainly lean heavily on all three of those, and indeed should do, but it is not those. It is not about search for the nature of
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Wow you went from zero to accusing a Jew of being really into that whole ubermensch aesthetic in record time!
If you advocate judging people based on social cues, then you are advocating judging people based on race, height, and eye color, because research has shown such features are important when it comes to social cues.
If your point is "sometimes you have to work with people" then no one disagrees with you. You could have saved typing and not posted.
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If you advocate judging people based on social cues, then you are advocating judging people based on race, height, and eye color, because research has shown such features are important when it comes to social cues.
Wow, you sound desperate. Yell and call me a racist as much as you wish, but your promotion beyond a low point is still going to depend on social cues. At a low level, your manager will give you nice, clear, direct instructions. Above a certain point that kind of thing ceases. Social cues is how y
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I've run across a few people who actively dig their own holes. We give them their own meeting to present their brilliant idea and they blow it off. Or they blow off the design team meetings and later complain that no one asked for their input.
It is true that often people misunderstand what the important parts of the job are. Some people act like they're in a college programming class. In real life programming jobs you need to engage: understand what the end goal is going to be, get a specification or wri
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Yep. Seems an unpopular opinion but engineering is a team sport. Their entire job is defined and paid for by other people so I'm surprised that they think that interactions with other people are essentially irrelevant.
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I personally never had trouble being productive remotely, but perhaps extrovert personalities, the bulk of who are over represented at the higher management levels, need more face time.
A lot depends on what you want. If you want to move up into higher better paying roles, face time is part of what enables that.
Seems like a personality flaw to me.
Not really, just a different one, that is a significant percentage of the population.
I also wonder how much of this is political pressure on companies because of how much remote work impacted local businesses.
That being part of it would not surprise me.
Has anyone out there actually have a 'serendipity' moment at the 'water cooler?'
Many. In my line of work, face to face and random discussions are an important enablers. YMMV
Never happened to me and I've been working since the mid 90's but again I'm introvert personality style and really don't get anything out of 'hanging out' with coworkers. I find it draining not invigorating.
As an introvert, I do as well but have adapted and learned extroverted behaviors to succeed at what I do.
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Same here, I'm mostly an introvert, and I did sort of have to learn how to interact more socially.
If someone is a genius but is working in a silo, then nobody will ever know how brilliant that person is. And yet I run across so many cases where someone complains bitterly about how no one recognizes their brilliance while at the same time that person is constantly trying to stay under the radar.
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I personally never had trouble being productive remotely, but perhaps extrovert personalities, the bulk of who are over represented at the higher management levels, need more face time. Seems like a personality flaw to me. I also wonder how much of this is political pressure on companies because of how much remote work impacted local businesses. Has anyone out there actually have a 'serendipity' moment at the 'water cooler?' Never happened to me and I've been working since the mid 90's but again I'm introvert personality style and really don't get anything out of 'hanging out' with coworkers. I find it draining not invigorating. But my BFF is the opposite, he's very gregarious and talks about how his house is basically a community center. Works for him.
I'm definitely not an extrovert, but at my previous job I would inevitably start chatting work in the lunch room and start gripping about some perpetually broken module or some really annoying workflow.
Sometimes it was just a waste of time, other times I got an idea for an improvement, and other times I got the feedback and motivation to push forward with another idea I had.
Now, there were definitely some hardcore introverts there who might as well have been mute, and I don't think they benefited from the o
Here's the reality (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Amazon has purchased a lot of expensive real estate and is getting massive tax breaks for it. They are required to fill those offices or take a huge loss.
3. Anytime a company says something about their office culture, it's about fostering lock-in. They want you there so you aren't applying anywhere else. They want to pay you less while keeping you trapped. They hope you make friends so you won't "abandon them" when you think about leaving for a big raise.
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I am skeptical of #2. I understand they get tax breaks for purchasing land, but I never heard of a rule any town has that penalized them for not bringing people into those offices. I would be interested if any place they got a tax break was able to foresee that there'd be a situation wherein a company would suddenly switch to work-from-home.
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I am skeptical of #2. I understand they get tax breaks for purchasing land, but I never heard of a rule any town has that penalized them for not bringing people into those offices. I would be interested if any place they got a tax break was able to foresee that there'd be a situation wherein a company would suddenly switch to work-from-home.
Why would you be skeptical? If they did not implement 2, companies would buy land to get a tax break and not have local employees (which is the point of tax break). As for examples, the most famous is Foxconn in Wisconsin [wikipedia.org]. For their subsidies, Foxconn had to hire a minimum number of employees by certain time periods. And they failed to do that.
Re: Here's the reality (Score:2)
So they can still hire locally without requiring the workers to be physically present at the office. It would still save money over having them come in.
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1. Ok. I quit. See if you can replace someone with 20 years in security, financial auditing and law who works for less than 150k a year easily. Because I can very easily replace you, rest assured of that, you think I have a hard time finding someone who accepts my terms?
2. You forgot to mention the part why I should care for my employer's bad decisions. You didn't ask me for my input, so don't complain now to me that you made them. Your choice, your responsibility.
3. I stated already that the only place Ama
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The thing is, I don't need that money. But asking for 150k means that you can't fire me. Because, hey, do it. I'll go to your boss and tell him you fired someone he has to replace with someone who costs at least 100k more, provided he can find someone.
But I'll come back. Just fire the goofball that fired me and we're even.
I'm now on the third "superior". I think I'll keep that one, he knows his place.
Translation (Score:4, Interesting)
The higher ups are not happy that these big expensive buildings are empty. We paid good money for these to appreciate in value and they’re depreciating.
Capitalism giveth and capitalism taketh. Two plus years now and corporate profit margins are higher than ever.
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We paid good money for these to appreciate in value and they’re depreciating. ... Two plus years now and corporate profit margins are higher than ever.
Which? Are they losing money because the buildings are depreciating, or are they making "higher than ever" profit margin? These are mutually contradictory.
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Which? Are they losing money because the buildings are depreciating, or are they making "higher than ever" profit margin? These are mutually contradictory.
False. They are losing money on the buildings, but they are still making higher than ever profit margin, because their costs have gone up much less than their prices. However, since greed springs eternal, they want still more profit. The shareholders can also use their facilities losses as basis for complaint.
Data (Score:5, Interesting)
"Invention is often sloppy. It wanders and meanders and marinates," Jassy wrote. "Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in-person than virtually."
That doesn't sound like data. It sounds like they are parroting someone else's observation, in an attempt to justify what they want.
Amazon doesn't invent things often enough to collect a reasonable amount of data about invention.
One size does not fit all (Score:2)
Working from home has added a totally new option for working life, and our society is not coping with it well. I have SOME sympathy with the argument that for new staff members, especially those who are inexperienced, an office allows them easier access to people able to help them develop. It's also true that 'brain storming' is hard to do well online. Yet many many jobs don't require very much of either of these. And a lot of people need more social interaction than those of us who don't, recognise.
I suspe
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Note, for example that if they went to 2 days/week or even alternating 2 days and 3 days per week they could cut their office size in half. 3 days a week is just enough to make a 5 day week require a full sized office space.
It's also notable that those serendipitous encounters by the water cooler were much hated by management until they needed excuses for mandating work in person.
I suspect the real reason is closer to managers who never developed any real skill at facilitating communication or judging worke
check for vested interests (Score:2)
Agreed.
So smart ... (Score:5, Interesting)
Management wants you to believe that they're so smart. But ...
For decades they had opportunity to run trials and evaluate WFH. Where are the analyses from those? But now they have numbers to prove that people should sit in offices (or cubicles). Where is that detailed analyses? Right.
And anyone who claims that brainstorming is essential to innovation is either lying or stupid. Sure, brainstorming may get you unstuck or produce the germ of an idea, but then a lot of hard work is usually required to build and/or prove out the idea.
Obviously WFH is productive and desirable for some people in some types of positions. Obviously it is not for others. Only a simpleton would think that a blanket policy was smart.
It's all much more complex and much harder than the Dunning-Kruger crowd understands.
Color me skeptical (Score:2)
"Learning from one another is easier in-person. Being able to walk a few feet to somebody's space and ask them how to do something or how they've handled a particular situation is much easier than Chiming or Slacking them."
When Alvin spontaneously walks over to Bob and asks if they can talk about whatever, Bob might be unable to do so because Bob is already talking to Charles who interrupted earlier than Alvin... but even if Bob is "free", Bob is now faced with the choice of (1) respond to Alvin, derailing whatever thing Bob was thinking about, or (2) spend the social energy telling Alvin he can't talk right now and could they chat later (and the choosing of the time, and the working out of the social dynamics to prevent mic
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To be fair, slack is also junk. The interface is just a blizzard of crap that all merges together. Why is it that whitespace on websites only comes in two varieties, too much and not enough?
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It might surprise many people to know that the Slack client is actually a web page disguised as a native app. It uses Electron and Chromium [wikipedia.org].
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It doesn't surprise me at all, because I've seen the web page, and there's no benefit to using the "app" instead of just loading it. In fact, there's a big drawback, which is that you have to load electron.
However, that's orthogonal to the issue, which is that their design is crap.
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It might surprise many people to know that the Slack client is actually a web page disguised as a native app. It uses Electron and Chromium [wikipedia.org].
And its fucking awful. Every time they've changed it in the last two years, its gotten harder to use.
Much cheerleading isn't about the specific jobs (Score:2)
We are seeing more of this (from TFS):
'GeekWire's article adds that local business organizations applauded Amazon's move, with the Bellevue Chamber, calling it "extraordinary news for the health and vitality in downtown."'
Personally, I don't really innately care about the "health and vitality in downtown". If you believe it matters, give us a reason. Note that "maintaining downtown service jobs" isn't really a reason - those will move to wherever people actually are. Nor is "maintaining our tax base".
Otherw
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Personally, I don't really innately care about the "health and vitality in downtown". If you believe it matters, give us a reason. Note that "maintaining downtown service jobs" isn't really a reason - those will move to wherever people actually are. Nor is "maintaining our tax base".
If you prefer the suburbs, then you ought to really care about the health and vitality of the downtown because that's what pays for the 'burbs. Sure it's maintaining the tax base, but the burbs will get a ton more expensive if t
Written by the overhead (Score:3)
Setting aside for a moment the tradeoffs between WFH and being in the office, these announcements always sound like they were written by people who have never actually built or invented anything whatsoever. Any bits of truth in the argument are undermined by this vibe that they don't actually know how things like software development occur.
"We've studied it and found that to make a cake, you really need a bowl. Like, you put stuff in there and then a cake happens, and the bowl is really important. We're strongly in favor of bowls."
It's all bullshit (Score:2)
As many have mentioned, this is all about personality types and absolutely nothing about actual productivity. Regardless of the recent layoffs in tech, everyone is still making money. No companies have failed and stocks are still strong. So it's pretty hard to believe that WFH is affecting productivity. If it is, I would LOVE to see the data on that. But of course there is no data. Because again, this is all about personality types. So let those who absolutely need to interact in person go back into
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As many have mentioned, this is all about personality types and absolutely nothing about actual productivity. Regardless of the recent layoffs in tech, everyone is still making money. No companies have failed and stocks are still strong. So it's pretty hard to believe that WFH is affecting productivity. If it is, I would LOVE to see the data on that. But of course there is no data. Because again, this is all about personality types. So let those who absolutely need to interact in person go back into the office. But leave the rest of us alone. You don't need us there and we don't want to be there.
It's not that simple. Some of those who absolutely need to interact in person, need to also interact with those who don't. If those people are high enough in the management heirarchy, they can demand that people come to the office to satisfy their need.
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Some of those who absolutely need to interact in person, need to also interact with those who don't.
OK, so what kind of interaction absolutely involves an in-person meeting? Or when you say "absolutely need" do you mean in the psychological sense?
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Some of those who absolutely need to interact in person, need to also interact with those who don't.
OK, so what kind of interaction absolutely involves an in-person meeting? Or when you say "absolutely need" do you mean in the psychological sense?
I meant in the psychological sense, as that was evidently the sense intended in the original posting. However, now that you mention it, I can think of an interaction that absolutely requires in person meeting: massage.
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lol!
Seen both (Score:2)
Working from home is more productive than working from office when...
Working from office is more productive than working from home when...
Unfortunately I don't think even Amazon higher ups know which one is applicable for which positions. Or industry specialists with highly paid consulting positions.
Sometimes collaboration is key, even face-to-face. But that it won't be tied to a role, or a level. In fact, I had to do most collaboration when I was doing low level work, for reasons beyond the scope of what I
Bosses make up their own reasons to exist. (Score:4, Insightful)
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If people don't need to show up, they don't need to be paid.
FTFY
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If people don't need to show up, they don't need to be supervised.
As a manager (well, not at the moment, but I managed for years and will almost certainly do it again), I think that's backwards. Of course, really good people don't need to be supervised regardless. The best way to manage them is to check in periodically to see if they need anything but otherwise leave them alone, and that can be done as well remotely as in person. But for most, when they're working remote they need more help and supervision, not less. Not so much to make sure they're not slacking off as to
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or in other words (Score:2)
The real reason (Score:4, Insightful)
Such insight (Score:2)
Serendipitous interactions help it, and there are more of those in-person than virtually.
Thank goodness my favorite O/S was written by people all crammed in the same warehouse instead of spread all over the globe with minimal face-to-face contact who may never have even known each other's real names.
Work where needed (Score:2)
I run my teams with the "work where you think you're needed" approach. It does not mean we all do WFH, it means I leave it to the team to figure it out on their own. Some can choose to go to work because they're best at it some can choose to do remote everything because they are capable enough to get the work done.
---
This is augmented by 2-week sprint cycles and retrospectives to allow adjustments as needed. The productivity can vary and **value** velocity can be tracked (this isn't done yet just because
Re:Lies. Claims are unprovable and illegal. (Score:4, Insightful)
The pandemic, where we all worked at home and tried to collaborate via Teams (which I hate), was a poor substitute.
Some things, like writing reports, turned out to be easy working at home. But there's only so much report writing you can do before you have to do actual work.
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It really depends on the specifics of your job, as well as your own personality and your family situation.
I'm in a small group with little-to-no overlap in skills from person to person - so our work discussions tend to involve broader ideas, which seems to work pretty well over Zoom/Teams. And, specific to my own job, I'm mostly writing code and administering servers/VMs. Physical access is rarely necessary or even helpful, and I can go in when need be (which is what I did during the Covid lockdown). Plus I
on or off site [Re:Lies. Claims are unprovable...] (Score:2)
It really depends on the specifics of your job, as well as your own personality and your family situation.
Absolutely agree.
When, as you say, your productivity comes when you're "hunkering down and writing code", off-site is great. (Unless your off-site location is full of interruptions, and you need to get to the office to hide away.)
Re:on or off site [Re:Lies. Claims are unprovable. (Score:5, Informative)
Re:on or off site [Re:Lies. Claims are unprovable. (Score:5, Insightful)
I find the Teams more interrupting: "you avail for a call?" and then I get dragged into an irrelevant meeting. When working at my desk I do get interrupted but also some people actually have the brains to notice that I am actually working and maybe the most they say is "I'll come back later."
The big time wasters don't change though: always the overloaded inbox on monday morning, whether you work from home or not. At home that inbox motivates me to just plop in front of the TV until I'm more awake :-)
For me, the office is nicer than home. Sorry, but that's just how it is, I know you all can't understand this. Better chair, better desk, dual monitors, better view out the window, people clean up the place, the food is better. Also I need lab space.
Also, working in the office and doing home stuff at home keeps the two SEPARATE! This is important. When the pandemic started we got good advice from a remote worker who works at home all the time. And the first rule was to keep work and life separate. No 24/7 on call bullshit, when the work is over shut off the computer. Same rule for the office - don't take work home with you. Being at home means someone out there may think you can now do the 7am meeting, or the 7pm meeting.
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I find the Teams more interrupting: "you avail for a call?" and then I get dragged into an irrelevant meeting. When working at my desk I do get interrupted but also some people actually have the brains to notice that I am actually working and maybe the most they say is "I'll come back later."
I haven't used Teams specifically, but I'm assuming it has something like a "Focus Time" or "Busy" setting that you can use when you need to not be interrupted. Or maybe put in some single-person calendar events for focus time.
For me, the office is nicer than home. Sorry, but that's just how it is, I know you all can't understand this. Better chair, better desk, dual monitors, better view out the window, people clean up the place, the food is better.
For me, the food is the same, because I'm walking distance from the nearest corporate cafe. But definitely true for having a better monitor. Windows are sunlight, and as a vampire^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hsoftware engineer, we don't like that much. :-D
Also, working in the office and doing home stuff at home keeps the two SEPARATE! This is important.
Yes and no. Yes, it is absolutely importa
Re:on or off site [Re:Lies. Claims are unprovable. (Score:5, Insightful)
- Teams has "do not disturb" mode. Or, depending on your work group's culture... you can even turn it off. When I need to really focus, I tell my boss I'm going dark then close Teams and my email.
- I'm probably in the minority, but my monitor at home is better (32" 4K). The chair at work is better though. I'm thinking about remedying that, on my own dime (which also is why my home monitor is better).
- I didn't used to understand how anyone could prefer going to the office. But I have a couple competent coworkers (non-managers haha) who make it clear that's what they like. It's just another way people are wired differently.
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I find the Teams more interrupting: "you avail for a call?" and then I get dragged into an irrelevant meeting. When working at my desk I do get interrupted but also some people actually have the brains to notice that I am actually working and maybe the most they say is "I'll come back later."
Just ignore 'em. Set yourself away and mute notifications. This isn't really a thing you can do in real life when people accost you while you're trying to get something done; they'll move around in front of you and wave their arms, make gestures for you to take off headphones, etc. They can't do that in Teams. They've got to wait. Its probably the single best productivity enhancer you get from WFH.
Sorry, but that's just how it is, I know you all can't understand this. Better chair, better desk, dual monitors, better view out the window, people clean up the place, the food is better. Also I need lab space.
Interesting. These are the exact same reasons I'd give for being remote; I have far faster equipment, mor
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In my work, I have noticed that being able to walk over and talk to people made teamwork much better.
And this is true . . . if the employee is in the same location as their team. One of the criticisms of this policy is some people were hired with the understanding they would be remote and not located near team members. Now that there is a new policy where they have to be in the office, there may be some difficult choices. If the employee is near an office (and this is not always true), they may be required to work in an office with no team members. Thus they have to spend all day on video or phone conferen
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What IS your work?
Re:Lies. Claims are unprovable and illegal. (Score:4, Informative)
Not the same [Re: Lies. Claims...] (Score:4, Interesting)
There is text, audio and video chat for that. Do you need to smell their farts or something?
Maybe it's all the same to you, but, no, Zoom and e-mail does not give you the same level of collaboration as actual human interaction.
Unless you're a chatbot.
-- it's not bad if you're in an already established team that knows how to work with each other. Hard if you're putting together a team incorporating new people you don't know.
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It does give me the same level of collaboration as actual interaction.
Also, it provides me with a better interface to my colleagues because I do not have to waste processing power on pretending to be human, I can concentrate on the topic at hand.
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Let me guess: you are a manager, right?
Would anyone else be so adamant about wasting workers time, time NOT PAID FOR?
Re: Lies. Claims are unprovable and illegal. (Score:5, Insightful)
In person always works better in my experience. Text is good for detailed stuff, but too many peope don't read it, or skim it. Video doesn't work as the lag is such that everyone is interrupting everyone else, and it's not really the same thing as being able to go up to a white board and draw a diagram and have real discussions: draw tools in Teams and other stuff suck, drawing with a mouse sucks; and for discussions online meetings have a "leader" and so most people just do not want to pipe up and talk even if you ask them to.
I do feel that many who hate the idea of in person meetings also hate the video meetings, and many of those just hate human interactions. The fact that some people get extremely angry over the very idea of meeting in person means this is more of an emotional argument than logic. Maybe the pandemic was their paradise, no need to ever see other humans.
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I do feel that many who hate the idea of in person meetings also hate the video meetings, and many of those just hate human interactions.
It's not because we're antisocial. It's because we don't like having our time wasted on stuff that doesn't actually affect us in any way. I've worked on projects where in-person meetings were incredibly useful exactly twice in my 22-year career. Both involved that level of interaction for only two or three weeks. That's 0.5% of my career. When you look at it from that perspective, the hour of extra driving every day is really hard to justify, particularly given that the drive tends to cut into work tim
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In my experience, and I was briefly a manager, many employees do not really know what is important. So I have seen them miss meetings that were specifically called for them. Ie, Bob doesn't understand the requirements, let's have a meeting, then Bob doesn't show. He's too busy implementing even though he doesn't even know what the requirements are yet! When someone says that ALL meetings are useless, then I think that person has a problem somewhere, even if that's just a long string of really bad jobs
Re: Lies. Claims are unprovable and illegal. (Score:2)
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The kind of culture Amazon has belongs in a petri dish.
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I mostly work from home, but now and then there are things that I need to go to the office for (setting up hardware, customer demos, training, etc). I enjoy chatting with my coworkers and there are times I'll learn something about a project I didn't know or tell them some new stuff about the projects I'm working on.
Does that make anyone more productive? Usually not since we're not working on the same projects. From a business point of view it would be better to keep people from unnecessarily chatting, bu
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Yup, so true. Nobody who does actual work wants to be in an office. It is only managers and marketing weasels who want the serfs in the office and defend this policy here on /.
Yeah. You can really see this mindset on LinkedIn, which is like an entire self-selected social network for those types of people.
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Yup, so true. Nobody who does actual work wants to be in an office. It is only managers and marketing weasels who want the serfs in the office and defend this policy here on /.
Not really true. Some of the people on my team (programmers in the videogame industry) do actually prefer to come to the office. Some prefer roughly split time. I honestly don't know why they prefer the office. It's a pretty nice place, with interesting people, so I can see that some more socially-involved people might like spending their working hours surrounded by others. Personally, I prefer staying at home, so I've basically turned full remote. Our company's leadership is smart - they allows peopl
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Not really true. Some of the people on my team (programmers in the videogame industry) do actually prefer to come to the office. Some prefer roughly split time. I honestly don't know why they prefer the office.
Much of my team prefer roughly split time. Some time for collaborative stuff some time for heads down solo stuff. Sometimes pair programming, switching between diagrams and code, is a really fast way to crack a tough problem and make progress.
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Some of the people on my team (programmers in the videogame industry) do actually prefer to come to the office. Some prefer roughly split time. I honestly don't know why they prefer the office. It's a pretty nice place, with interesting people, so I can see that some more socially-involved people might like spending their working hours surrounded by others.
That's why.
I would prefer split time, but not the way anybody does it. These days, everybody says, "Work from the office on Tuesday through Thursday." So traffic on Monday and Friday is light, and traffic on Tuesday through Thursday is Armageddon. Let us choose which days to work from the office. Better yet, pass laws giving tax breaks to businesses who balance their employees' road use across all five work days so that they aren't contributing to the problem.
Ideally, we should spend Monday and Friday i
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