Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual. Full time remote has done wonders for my health - instead of a 2 hour commute I get to exercise. Instead of coming home stressed, annoyed, and sitting in front of the TV, I go outside for a solid hour+ after I close my laptop. I travel more liberally now that I don’t have to take time off to do so. My quality of life has never been better, and my gratefulness translates into feelings of loyalty towards my employer. Why would I quit if I’m treated well and have a nice work life balance? Why would I risk this situation by slacking off when I am on the clock?
Prior to the remote shift, I was unhappy and I didn’t even realize. No exercise, no passion outside of work. All my energy went into my 10+ hour day (when you consider the commute).
Since then I’ve lost 30lbs, become enamored with new sports and hobbies, and my social life outside of work exists again. I feel more “alive” than I have in a decade.
I’ll never work for a company that doesn’t allow me that flexibility for the rest of my career, as long as I can help it. Companies that want access to good talent would be wise to follow this example.
Just as a contrast, I think I've had the exact opposite WFH/lockdown experience as you. My quality of life has tangibly and significantly degraded across every positive point you listed. Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before.
I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis!
Now I'm gaining weight (although not enough for a booster), lonely, and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.
Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut.
I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me.
Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.
I was thinking about it, but before as an academic before I always had the option to remote work, just I didn't do it at home. The cafe, the museum, just bike to my best thinking place in the morning and then bike to the university for lunch and an afternoon meeting. I never really had decent work and exercise opportunities at home, so I would spend as little time as there as possible.
These days I'm no longer an academic but ironically I've been full time WFH since I switched at the beginning of the pandemic. So now I have a nice house with a nice chair and a nicer monitor than I could get in the office. And an oculus 2 for exercise, which works out (but might not be for everyone). And those second places where I did all my best thinking outside of home and the office don't really exist anymore and might not ever exist again :(.
> and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.
Ya, being at home would be really a lot worse if my 4 year old wasn't in pre-K.
My quality of life dramatically went down as well. I'm a highly extroverted SWE and I need some modicum of social interaction to be able to function at peak performance. Prior to the pandemic, I had a social life that I was very much grateful for.
I'm also a minority and don't come from Ivy League/Top 10, so I felt that my biggest advantage was the impression I could make on others in person. In a remote-first world, I lose my biggest advantage.
Me aside, I can't help but think there are some underlying drawbacks to a remote-first world that we aren't talking about enough. But I know that, at least within the tech industry, I'm in the minority by believing that a life that is easier and more comfortable is automatically the better design.
One is not better than the other. It's not a contest. Kudos to employers who can acknowledge that different people have different needs and cater to both!
I understand the fact that you don't have the motivation of "gotta get to work/home!", but you could always get up earlier and go on a looped bike ride before and/or after work (I've actually seen a lot of people doing this as a sort-of "simulated commute", which they claim also helps with creating a mental office-home separation).
Which is why smart employers give their employees a choice of how to work instead of a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t. Working two days in the office is perfect for me for example.
> and my gratefulness translates into feelings of loyalty towards my employer.
Yes and in turn translates to better quality work. In my case, I'm consciously adding extra web dev cherries on top every chance I can.
I haven't set foot in the office since the beginning of 2020, mostly due to lockdown. My boss is okay with it because he's happy with my work. I will never go back, I'd quit first.
Things I don't miss:
* The shared microwave always covered with a layer of grime on the inside.
* The office coffee machine, you drank it because it contains caffeine.
* Noise pollution from loud phone calls about things you have nothing to do with.
* Air con
* Air con set to a temperature you would change if you could.
* Staff toilets in general. Men's urinals without divider partitions.
* The small-talk encounters replayed every day with slightly different arrangement of words. They can be enjoyable too, but this is a cynical list.
* Driving and public transport, they both suck.
* Alarm clocks. For the first time in my life I wake up at the right time without an alarm.
* Not being able to make really nice breakfasts that take more time to prepare. (Porridge using steel-cut oats requires a 25 minute simmer, for example).
You are me. We had cubicle walls that were so short they didn't make any difference with noise because half the employees were on their feet while having conversations away. Constant talking. It was endless. Non stop complaining about significant others. Thankfully I had an hour lunch to get away for awhile.
We overheard every call because it was cubicle after cubicle in one big room. But hey! Let's complain about the customer that we just overheard you talking to for 30 minutes. Let's relive it after every call. Man.
Hey yeah, let's have our personal cell phone alert tone be a Linkin Park song at the loudest possible volume and always leave on their desk next to you. What a hell hole.
Micromanagement? You got it! You haven't experienced pedantry until you've met my supervisor. If you misspeak a word he pretends to not understand what you mean until you've re-spoken it in a way he understands. Now that we converse over chat/email almost entirely that ridiculous behavior has subsided.
They rarely cleaned the bathrooms thoroughly. One urinal. One stall. Just gross.
Microwave encrusted with who knows what. Janitors don't clean microwaves I guess?
I'm not one of those people that has very specific temperature needs. But of course we had one of those people that was very underweight in the office that needed it to be much warmer than normal. Why can't those people just wear more layers of clothing and not make the rest us suffer in sweat?
Parking? Okay that was close. If you can find a spot.
I will never go back to the office. I will also quit my job first.
I started a new job this year. The employer and our manager have made it clear, IF you feel safe coming into an office once the company declares it safe you can. If you are never comfortable ever again with coming in to the office, you won't have to. They have dedicated themselves to what works best for each employee, zero pressure. Nobody on my team is going in it's been decided.
I am way more productive at home. I have ADHD and the distraction of an office environment is too much and makes it hard for me to concentrate. My productivity has never been higher. I don't dread going to work, I get paid enough that I do not need to find a better place. And I have been a remote worker since 2011 and never, ever want to go back to work in an office.
Heh. I’m not disagreeing with your experience (as it’s yours, obviously) but I’m amused because I also have ADHD and an way less productive with WFH because home has so much more distraction; in an office where others are working it was much easier for me to focus than at home where Netflix or hacker news is only a tab away, and there’s no risk of anyone walking by. Plus, pairing was sort of focusing by default as well, and that’s harder (though not impossible) to do now.
> Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual.
I feel like this is the key thing.
Instead of mandating blanket policies (whatever they are) that might not make sense for every team, trust your employees to self-organize in the way that makes the most sense for them and the way they work.
I'm in the same boat, and like you, doubt I will want to work any other way again.
The problem is that in many cases, the pro-office people, despite saying otherwise, probably do need everyone - or at least most, to be in the office with them for them to personally gain the benefits of the social office environment. The benefits of you WFO depends on your coworkers.
If you are a pro-WFO person on a team that offers flexibility to WFH or WFO, but nearly everyone but you is WFH, then what do you do?
In contrast if you are a pro-WFH person but the rest of your team is in the office, you probably don’t care as much because the benefits you gain from WFH aren’t dependent on your coworkers.
I'm a parent. I've had 2 employers in the last 7 years, switching in June of this year.
When covid struck initially, I kept my kid home with me. My job, aside from a daily standup and a weekly meeting, could be done while juggling my child. I worked really odd hours, bc I could. Early AM, later at night. But I got to protect my kid and my family from a disease I didn't know much about, for 15 months.
My new job disallows me to juggle him but it's still WFH. He started school anyways.
I exercise more. I meditate more. Go outside more - get little chores done, cut the grass on my lunch break rather than cutting in on family time.
The lack of a 45-115 min commute each way has been a lifesaver. Going to the doctor is faster and less time consuming bc my docs are near my home and not near my work. I can jog in the morning and still be to work "on time" rather than having to get up earlier and trade exercise for sleep.
And what's more.. When I do break, I get to see my wife. Or talk to my parents on the phone. At lunch I can catch up on a TV show, a podcast, a YouTube vid, that I'm interested in but my family might not be.
It affords me more ability to access my personal computer for things I might not do on a company machine.
I can do training videos and obligatory but time pointless and wasting meetings that never ask for my participation while in my "poor man's sauna" (hot bath + space heater in the room) or on a exercise bike or while walking around the block.
I miss being around people I like at work.
But alas.. I don't like anyone at my new job even a little
Even now in October you wake up in the darkness, and it's dark again at 4 pm here. When WFH you can decide flexibly what time is the best for you for an hour of outside activity. You can go out at noon to enjoy few minutes of gentle sunshine. Then, being recharged it feels awesome and the total productivity is great.
Yes the most notable effect is I can eliminate the commuting time and spend that to exercise outside (for 2 hours!). Now I can come back to improve my running distance, discover the joy of bicycling and so much more!
But I miss the interaction with real people. Sure you have application to help with chatting and meeting but somehow I long for the real connection. And I'm speaking from the perspective of an introvert. There's something that remote working can replace the serendipity. I felt I had much more creative ideas when working onsite.
> Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual.
imagine working for an employer that treats you like a human being.
> ... There is a more intriguing possibility, however. Work that is largely done remotely may be more efficient compared with an office-first model.
I don't think in-person real-time communication is always effective. No, I personally think it's one of the least method of communication that can happen in an office environment when the topic gets slightly complex (that is, if the topic is complex enough for you to write a memo about it).
For those topics, I love to communicate with some "written" form, such as in an email, posts etc. Because doing the "writing" part allow me to conduct some research and analyses on the topic (usually took 10 minutes), which will in turn increase the quality of my reply.
If you standing right in front of me and asked a question that require a complex answer, then my reply will probably make me look like an idiot, because I might not able to discover all the information that I need to process and output within 30 seconds. Not very effective in my opinion.
One reason I have found real-time communication ineffective is that it favors the narcissists and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over everyone else.
Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept.
Oh, and did I say that this interruption and talking for a long time seems to get ten time worse over video calls for some reason – perhaps because Bob finds it easier to pontificate while in his pajamas compared to having to stand up and talk in front of his peers in the office.
Yeah, I know the standard retort for this is "your meeting must have an agenda" et cetera. Guess what, look at the last 5 meetings on your calendar and tell me truthfully how many of them have a real agenda (mindlessly repeating the title as the description doesn't count). People don't want to do it, because, guess what, it adds an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time.
So, I have found that just going the whole way and just having the entire communication asynchronously is often better at ensuring more equitable participation.
It's no fun if you don't enjoy confrontation but interrupting the interrupters a few times will eventually send the message you won't tolerate that kind of behavior. They will eventually learn it's not tolerated or accepted.
One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking. Then he would reintroduce the subject and if they again tried to take over this boss would literally say "We've heard what you had to say, but XYZ wanted the say something as well". More than just stopping the disruptive behavior you have to acknowledge it and make it clear something else will happen now.
> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept.
True story. I've seen it happen over and over again, and it's one of the many reasons why I would be very reluctant to become an employee ever again.
There’s a deeper aspect to this and that is that meritocracy is a fantasy. People skills trump almost _everything_ else, including black hat people skills like dominating a room.
it puts an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time.
Oh, the difficultly of getting people to think about things in advance. The number of meetings where it's clear that basically nobody has actually put any thought in, done any research, even read the entire meeting invitation.
Meetings become a way to force people to spend time on a topic, and the act of being there where everyone can see them means they can't goof off and do something else again.
It sounds like it's a workaround for dealing with bad co-workers? You can still have these in async communication and others will just give up eventually. And then the guy who gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly.
Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.
Bob sounds pretty annoying, but I would also say that this team has a leadership failure if this is what happens regularly.
If I was Bob's manager I would have a clear conversation with him about his behaviour, and I would - at minimum - make sure that everyone on the team has a chance to present their ideas without interruption.
Maybe we need more structural hurdles than just the agenda — e.g. everyone gets an egg timer that refills more slowly than it empties. You flip it when you start talking.
> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry.
This happens in Zoom meetings and phone calls all the time too. It’s even worse in remote land when it happens.
Assume good intent on the part of others. This is generally good advice, but especially true in the work place.
I have been “Bob” some times, but it was not out of ego.
Sometimes a meeting is called because there is a problem that doesn’t fall neatly into existing organizational buckets and the company is doing a scavenger hunt to identify existing domain experts. If you’re that domain expert, your role in that meeting is to quickly establish that fact and work to bring everyone to a shared understanding of the issue, possible causes, and possible solutions.
Also, sometimes meetings are not called for a conversation, they are called for an information broadcast that requires people’s undivided attention because alignment and understanding needs to be established before work can continue.
I have been on both the receiving end of “Bob”, and stuck being “Bob”. But, to your point having a good agenda is crucial, partly to frame things ahead of time so meeting participants know if this is a broadcast, a conversation, or a scavenger hunt. For the latter, most importantly because maybe “Bob” knows that “Linda” is the foremost expert on X and should have been invited.
> it tends to favor the narcissist and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over everyone else
While this is a great point, I wouldn't say it is just narcissists and egoists. I spent quite a lot of meetings before being the "Jane" or just sitting waiting for people to end until I learned to cut off and intersect at a point, but I spent quite a lot of the time wondering why some people keep on talking and have noticed a few categories.
1. ) We got the narcissists and egoists. Some talk because they love to talk and hear themselves, some love the attention, some talk because they think only their opinion is worthy.
2.) We got "look how smart I am" talkers - Wouldn't put them in the first category, but these people will usually take a point other participants make, say it differently then start explaining it to prove themselves smart. Fits more under the category below, but is a category of its own since it can also be not from insecurity, but "smarter than thou" attitude.
3. ) We got insecure ones - some people start talking with the good intent of trying to offer useful information, but due to their insecurities they start overly-explaining it and rambling off since they keep waiting for someone to intersect and give them approval. You can usually notice them by the anxious rush to talk and weird "uhhh..ah...and...umm" breaks where they are checking for feedback from the audience, and if they dont get it, they continue talking.
4. ) The "breadth-first explainers" - These people are trying to communicate their idea or vision, but their method of communication is breadth-first explaining. Unfortunately, instead of "We can do A and B" they wander of into explaining everything related to every point in-between A and B. Example:
"We just need to make a HTTP Request... So we can make a POST call here - POST is the type of request that creates data - like POST with the new name, surname, title or it can be anything like the whole model, a file... other request serve for other purposes, you have GET.... (10 minutes later).. So we will make the client - this can be the phone, computer, watch - send the data to the server.."
They suck to have in meetings when its all about ideating and innovating. They are great to have in meetings when stuff is known and needs to be explained to customers/people out of context.
5. ) The managers - I call them the managers because they either call the meetings to discuss nothing or make sure the meeting is spend discussing irrelevant or tangentially relevant topics instead of dealing with the actual topics. They usually take someones question or answer to go off into unrelated, often philosophical topics. Still not sure why some do it and is it insecurity, showing off or just the lack of social awareness.
6.) The sellers - I'd put them with narcissists, but they deserve a category of their own. These people usually have something they want to sell or a narrative they want to push. They will wander off into stories that support their cause, taking up as much time as possible of the meeting to minimise time available to resist the sell. A lot of these usually work as sales and when the meeting is over, it's either their way or "lets continue the discussion some other time".
On the other hand, for complex topics I’ve found that a face-to-face conversation is often much more effective because it allows both parties to have a rapid back and forth to resolve misunderstandings or gaps in the conversation. Asynchronous communication is poor at this.
Discussion in meetings has felt mostly useless to me over the years for the exact reasons that the parent pointed out. On the other hand, some of the best work I've done was at a job where the person I worked with most had the same train ride home as me, so we'd just chat for half an hour 2-3x a week. It allowed both of us to work through ideas, and come to much stronger conclusions.
> for complex topics I’ve found that a face-to-face conversation is often much more effective because it allows both parties to have a rapid back and forth to resolve misunderstandings or gaps in the conversation.
Face-to-Face conversation can also happen remote synchronous.
Absolutely agreed. I've often found myself seeing that someone has misunderstood something, and wanting to write "if the source of your misunderstanding is (a) then [several paragraphs] whereas if it's (b) then [several different paragraphs]. Asking them whether it's (a) or (b) by email adds another cycle and often isn't understood anyway. It's just far more effective to communicate synchronously (face to face or by phone).
Yes, it is like flying a toy drone in your room vs. flying a drone on the Mars. In the first case if you see it heading into the wall you can correct it immediately. On the Mars it may be already too late when you find out it is heading into some boulder.
One example of where this is counter-intuitively wrong is that you end up with more diverse ideas if people brainstorm in private than in a group.
I think the reality of face to face meetings is that the result is often almost predetermined based on the existing group dynamics. How many people are turning up to the meeting feeling their input will make a difference versus people with (probably) the dominant personalities who are happy their established conclusion is chosen. And seeing the later as naturally coming to a better conclusion, faster.
As a dominant personality in meetings I definitely think about the effects of that a bunch.
I've felt like "group reasoning" in person is more like getting people on the same page to execute on an idea, which doesn't equate with the merit of that idea.
Once that discussion kicks off in a large-ish group, I've found it hard to pivot the direction of that conversation - if you think there's a better, independent solution that's not aligned with the group train of thought.
I think the best way is a combination of both. Async written message first to establish context, followed by in person communication—if necessary—to clear up any confusion.
For example, our team used to have a 15 minute standup meeting every day, where we would go around and give our status updates. Many people complained that most of the time, the information being shared wasn’t relevant to them. We replaced it with a daily Slack thread where people could share their updates. Then, in the 15-minute meeting people could ask any questions they had or bring up anything they wanted to discuss more. This resulted in the daily standup meetings becoming a much more effective use of everyone’s time.
>For those topics, I love to communicate with some "written" form, such as in an email, posts etc. Because doing the "writing" part allow me to conduct some research and analyses on the topic (usually took 10 minutes), which will in turn increase the quality of my reply.
That and to me at least almost more important is the ability to refer back to history.
You have a little oral discussion with your co-workers about an issue, or maybe ask for some clarification on something etc. Then a few days later when you think you need that info again, it's gone.
Having a discussion in Slack, Mattermost, email, etc allows me to always refer back and see what we've been talking about. Which can be vital especially in those situations where we're talking about complex issues with complex answers. The fact that I can a week later go back and see the same clarification again, is definitely helpful
i find it easier to speak up in front of people way above my pay grade. the digital barrier erases all of what i would call the "scary boss" intimidation. allows me to ask more pointed questions no matter who is in the teams "room"
Not mentioned enough on this topic: not all engineers are software engineers and not all software engineers never need to touch hardware.
If you plan to work on/with web frameworks, advertisements, data science, or pure CS topics for your whole career, then there's probably no excuse to force you to come into the office 5 days a week. But good luck doing that as a software engineer at a company like SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, AMD, defense contractors, etc., let alone as any other kind of STEM professional. I think it's an important distinction to make. For me personally, some of the coolest work I can imagine doing is likely going to be done in the office/lab for the foreseeable future.
You're right that not all engineers get to WFH but more can than you'd imagine.
I know defense contractors that are working from home. Two of them did so before the pandemic too - remoting into hardware they're not allowed to physically touch even if they were in the lab!
A neighbour is a civil engineer and the huge screens he needed to do his job were only in the office. Now that he's moved that huge screen (and I mean massive, it's like a telly), the office have told him that he only needs to go into the office to meet clients.
I have a product design dear friend who bought himself a Prusa 3D printer and now can pretty much 100% WFH. He prefers it because he no longer has to share resources.
A neighbour is a network engineer and he spent 2020 decommissioning hardware in the server room and moving it into the cloud - something he said was inevitable for his business but the pandemic hastened it. He now WFH pretty much 100% of the time.
I know someone who works for a SSD manufacturer in the states and they WFH most of the week.
All the web/data devs I know WFH pretty much full time - except one but only because his boss is draconian.
Yep. I do control systems for 20+ tonne hydraulic robot arms (among other things). 90% of the work I don’t have to catch a plane for can be done at home.
> We don't even have nearly enough hardware to give every engineer access.
This is the problem I always run into too. An emulator should be standard on any system development program that has software interacting with hardware.
I have spent my whole career working at places like AMD and NVidia, either writing systems software or doing computer architecture.
Yes, we work with various forms of pre- and post-silicon devices but you will find that either they can be accessed remotely, or you can send them by courier to whoever needs one.
So, sure, _some_ people need to be in the lab touching the hardware, especially during bringup, but the immense majority of the people, the immense majority of the time, can work remotely.
Works at lesser known places as well :) Courier the boards, remote into a leee-nucks connected to them, work on the soc manufacturer's sample which you can order from anywhere and then remote into the real board. Lots of solutions to do the job from home.
I think you are overestimating the requirement to touch the hardware by few order of magnitude for a software engineer there. Just yesterday I was reading a linkedin post from some senior electrical engineer in Apple M1 division and how they achieved everything remotely. For a fabless company, I don't think most of the engineers would need to touch the chip. Similarly for Tesla and SpaceX, they had great two years when almost all software engineers were working remotely.
I worked on flight software for cargo dragon, and one time I got an email asking for my help inside one of the capsules. I had to ask where the capsule was, and everybody lol'ed.
It was a fun day; I got to wear a bunny suit and a headset and climb around inside a space ship.
Yep, I read lots of Verilog nowadays. I think the implication is that you need to be on site to mess with experimental hardware. But that's not true. It's all colocated and cloud-based nowadays, even for companies that are otherwise paranoid.
I e done firmware development from home for over a decade. I need help once and a while from someone in the lab to push buttons or make connections or do reworks or whatever. But I have no trouble getting most of my work done from anywhere I have a half decent internet connection. The oscilloscope runs Windows and I can VNC to it. The (very old) logic analyzer runs HP-UX and connects to an X server to present its UI. We have network controlled relays and power supplies. We can get a lot done without physically being there.
Yeah sometimes you do need to touch things that you can't bring home.
But there are people like me, people who do touch hardware.. at home. My desk is full of hardware. Behind me there's another desk with an oscilloscope, lab psu, dmm, electric load, a pile of probes, a soldering station..
It's not like we get new hardware every day, and when we do, it's not a big deal to wait a day or two for the courier to bring a prototype to my home.
There are sibling comments here that mention the same, however, to add my own point here: I'm involved in a complex hardware plus software project which involves designing and doing a board bring-up for an Arm SoC Linux-based device. We need to visit the office only once in two to three weeks. For the board bring-up when we do not have the provision to provide the hardware to our software engineer yet, we have someone in the office connect the UART lines to it and have the typical VPN+SSH set up to perform the board bring-up for it.
Generally speaking, the engineers that are required for the labs would be electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Also, even for these physical-based engineering disciplines, a lot of design is highly computer based thanks to great CAD, simulation, and future-looking generative design software from the likes of Autodesk, Ansys, etc.
That being said, I personally feel that being in person really can help in the epiphany process for hardware-based projects.
Yes, but not all non-software engineers need to _touch_ hardware.
Eg if you are a civil engineer, lots of your work is spent doing calculations and designing things. When you do touch hardware, it's usually 'on site' and not at the office.
Most of my job is working on drivers for hardware that is in lab thousands of kilometers away. I've never been in that lab, I just ssh to system with hardware to interact with it.
The irony is that while you won't do it as their employee, the same companies will happily hire offshoring companies that work just like that from the other side of the planet.
Aside from what others say, there is a trend to 'cloudify' even things like bench work in biology. Companies that allow people to run remote experiments. This will probably change the way university labs teach things
One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.
I think it's pretty cool. And I think that kind of work needs people who think it's cool, or else it'll only attract evil people.
There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals.
I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I might take it. After all, where else are you going to see the most advanced weaponry in the history of mankind?
Defense contracts aren't all weapons - in fact, I'd wager most aren't (by quantity, if not by dollar amount). Due to how the US allocates its budget, a large portion of its publicly funded research goes through DoD contracts. The startup I used to work at had a contract for making prototypes of multi-material 3D printers for creating medical training models (ie artificial cadavers).
Those things are also insurance against being killed. Are you supposed to just hope the bad people don't pick you? No, you invest in offense so you can have a better defense.
I see four main tiers: 1 - 9-5 in office (business as usual), 2 - semi-remote (part of week in the office), 3 - fully remote with fixed hours, 4 - fully remote outcomes-based (no fixed hours but may also be 'on call').
The title of this article perhaps indicates a move from 1 to 3 or 4 but its content discusses 2. All the information I've seen is that business are definitely moving more to 2 than 3 or 4, though some do see this a just a first step.
Its a big difference for the future of cities as 2 is more 'coastal historic town just outside the city', 3 is more 'small town in the same part of the world' and 4 is more 'move to thailand'.
2 is still a local workforce with visas and taxation where 4 is a global workforce available anywhere with a base level of infrastructure, and little taxation for service-based business until there is greater international cooperation.
Define fixed hours? Fixed hours sucks when people live in 4 or more different timezones.
I'm trying to figure out if my current remote job is fixed hours. Nobody has ever asked me or said anything about the hours I work, but I am expected to be present for meetings, which usually occur in the middle of the day for me. Is that tier 3 or 4?
OP missed a category really. If there are any consistent sync points in the day with the whole team, that creates “core hours” where everyone is expected to be in during those, but otherwise the hours are whenever you want. Maybe call it 3.5?
Also of note: you can have in-office work with the same flexible hours schemes.
In my view of the world that's closer to tier 4 than 3, but I acknowledge there's a lot of grey area between. Maybe 3 and a half. At the start of the tier 3 side (maybe I should call it 3.0) there are solid 9-5 workers who log timesheets with 8 hours per day, are expected to answer the phone between 9 and 5 but not outside, etc.
Same situation as you here. We have our standup mid-afternoon to make sure everyone can attend.
I'd say we're 4s more than 3s. I would say that an agreed upon, regular meeting doesn't dictate your set hours--just a single obligation that you all agreed to.
Going from any of these items to 4 requires an extra special leap of faith. I personally see anything short of a full 4 as essentially being office work theater.
Our company operates as a 4 tier and I've been here for going on 7 years now. We still have to get on a daily standup call at a fixed time every day, and I still have to participate in other scheduled obligations (mainly tech calls with customers), but the rest of the time is mine to allocate as I see fit.
Also, there are consequences with "no fixed hours" that lots of humans are incapable of dealing with. The amount of discipline it requires to manage this freedom is not insignificant. This said, I am not against multitasking. If you can have something rolling while you get your work done, fuckin awesome. I don't care. I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
Are you really worried about a co-worker drinking beer and dicking around instead of helping with a busted merge? Did you make a bad hire? That's the kind of hyperbole managers use to rein everyone in.
> I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
I've had these scenarios in a 9-5 office job - eg. someone merged in some shit that broke migrations, CI takes forever to run so they don't catch it, the next day they are off and now I'm there touching systems I know little about just to revert my setup to a working state.
I think if you can't rely on people in your team to be professional/competent it's going to be shit no matter where you work. That being said managing flexible work hours is really hard, it's especially hard if you're bad at estimating how much is acceptable to deliver in some time frame. If you always give estimates based on what you're capable at your ideal 8 work hours you're going to sink a lot more time than 8 hours a day - especially if you allow yourself to be distracted. I try to give my estimates based on 4 productive hours per day.
I suspect that the "coastal historic town just outside the city" (or other pleasant location that is within a 1 to 2 hour drive of an urban metro office--which is often not actually in the city) is probably fairly sticky. Even if a lot of people in the US don't want to make the tradeoffs to live in an urban core, for all sorts of reasons they may want to live within striking distance of a US city as opposed to moving to some small mountain town much less a beach in Thailand.
> Economists have less insight into why remote workers might be more productive. One possibility is that they can more easily focus on tasks than in an office, where the temptation to gossip with a co-worker looms large.
Wow, how out of touch and patronizing is this? How about, it’s hard to concentrate in these cheap open-plan offices where you have to listen to every other conversation in the vicinity?
haha very much this. The upside of not getting disturbed while concentrating and having better work/life balance is not exactly one of life greatest mysteries.
This plus the "make your own schedule" organization that installs itself after the first weeks/months, and you can finally reach the peace of mind one, as an individual, needs to thrive.
That being said, I can understand the reluctance of the management, since they're basically losing control of both time and space of their teams. Which can be quite scary if you're not prepared.
But hey, managerial inertia should be fought if everyone else is happy.
At very least my office is going to have to improve my working conditions for me to go back a significant portion of time. Crowded noisy open plan space with constant interruptions aint gonna cut it any more. Give me private space (office or not), stop interrupting me, and give me my 3-monitor setup I have at home and we can talk :-)
I have 2x 27" 1440p IPS screens at home, which is just perfect for coding. The single 24" 1080p screen is not going to cut it at the office.
At home I'm also using my desktop (rysen-based + nvme) pc for work and it feels about 10x faster than the macbook air they supply (which I haven't done real work on for the last year). I'm also using a Logitech G815 + Logitech G102 with a massive mouse pad. My desk has been lowered (I've cut the legs shorter to an exact height) to a point where my knees/legs are in the air to allow blood flow. I also have an electric foot warmer for the winter months (pet heating pad in a nice cover). Other than that, nicer headphones + speakers + studio microphone and overall desk aesthetics...So I want to see them replicate my very comfortable setup that I have at home vs the office. Also having fiber at home without silly restrictions.
I have a cubicle which is much maligned in corporate buzz as "cubicle hell" but I have to say I really love it! It's big enough to do yoga inside and has high walls that you can't see over and also a sliding door. I love my cube. The ability to concentrate, take a quick meeting at your desk and take calls is so much better than open office. Also, I appreciate the ability to scratch my face or check if I have lettuce in my teeth without the entire office watching.
I strongly agree. I'm remote for the next few years because family has taken me outside a big metro area. But when I move back I'm gonna be open to working in an office, just so long as it's actually good. If I have to be a sardine in a deskfarm then I'd rather WFH; if the office has flexible spaces and enough desks and good equipment then maybe.
For everyone being compelled by their inner "Dog in the Manger" crying outsourcing to cheap countries. Outsourcing is already in play since 3 decades, but the actual salaries are kept in check by a stack of intermediaries.
Hiring remote workers directly would greatly speed up the process of salary equalisation (adjusted for COL). This in turn would put pressure on other industries in these countries and accelerate technical investments in productivit rather than relying on suply of cheap labour.
In the end after some 1-2 decaedes we'd wake up in much flatter world with perhaps reasons to not impose limits on labour mobility across borders.
> Hiring remote workers directly would greatly speed up the process of salary equalisation (adjusted for COL).
What makes you think that this adjustments for cost of living would persist? Competitive pressures are towards paying for productivity, not for cost of living.
> In the end after some 1-2 decades we'd wake up in much flatter world with perhaps reasons to not impose limits on labour mobility across borders.
I am not so sure about that. I share your hope for a flatter world, but I think that wage differentials are _not_ why people want to restrict migration. It's just a somewhat socially acceptable excuse that's sometimes given, but people will come up with other excuses as necessary.
My main evidence for this view is that migration from comparatively rich countries is not all that freer in most places. (And economically, migration from poorer countries doesn't make the receiving country poorer either, but people don't believe that.)
> What makes you think that this adjustments for cost of living would persist? Competitive pressures are towards paying for productivity, not for cost of living.
I think there is not a lot of competitive pressure, if there was, the salaries in Europe and Canada would already match the US ones.
It's another thing that the COL is quickly converging, especially in big cities. Goods already cost pretty much the same (adjusted for local taxes), services and housing vary a lot and remote work allows to arbitrage them. So in medium term you'll have an option to work from Zurich at $$$ or from anywhere at XX % less (the option I'd pick).
I have yet to see a reasonable argument for restricting migration, perhaps this would be a good topic for ASK HN? All economic arguments show free movement would lead to better labour (and capital) allocation.
Readit News
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028100825/https://www.econo...
Prior to the remote shift, I was unhappy and I didn’t even realize. No exercise, no passion outside of work. All my energy went into my 10+ hour day (when you consider the commute).
Since then I’ve lost 30lbs, become enamored with new sports and hobbies, and my social life outside of work exists again. I feel more “alive” than I have in a decade.
I’ll never work for a company that doesn’t allow me that flexibility for the rest of my career, as long as I can help it. Companies that want access to good talent would be wise to follow this example.
I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis!
Now I'm gaining weight (although not enough for a booster), lonely, and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.
I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me.
Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.
These days I'm no longer an academic but ironically I've been full time WFH since I switched at the beginning of the pandemic. So now I have a nice house with a nice chair and a nicer monitor than I could get in the office. And an oculus 2 for exercise, which works out (but might not be for everyone). And those second places where I did all my best thinking outside of home and the office don't really exist anymore and might not ever exist again :(.
> and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.
Ya, being at home would be really a lot worse if my 4 year old wasn't in pre-K.
I'm also a minority and don't come from Ivy League/Top 10, so I felt that my biggest advantage was the impression I could make on others in person. In a remote-first world, I lose my biggest advantage.
Me aside, I can't help but think there are some underlying drawbacks to a remote-first world that we aren't talking about enough. But I know that, at least within the tech industry, I'm in the minority by believing that a life that is easier and more comfortable is automatically the better design.
all of the complaints about remote work are more about the pandemic rather than remote work
Just go and bike for two hours around the block and don't bother people fine with wfh.
It's literally something nobody is preventing you from doing (besides yourself).
Yes and in turn translates to better quality work. In my case, I'm consciously adding extra web dev cherries on top every chance I can.
I haven't set foot in the office since the beginning of 2020, mostly due to lockdown. My boss is okay with it because he's happy with my work. I will never go back, I'd quit first.
Things I don't miss:
* The shared microwave always covered with a layer of grime on the inside.
* The office coffee machine, you drank it because it contains caffeine.
* Noise pollution from loud phone calls about things you have nothing to do with.
* Air con
* Air con set to a temperature you would change if you could.
* Staff toilets in general. Men's urinals without divider partitions.
* The small-talk encounters replayed every day with slightly different arrangement of words. They can be enjoyable too, but this is a cynical list.
* Driving and public transport, they both suck.
* Alarm clocks. For the first time in my life I wake up at the right time without an alarm.
* Not being able to make really nice breakfasts that take more time to prepare. (Porridge using steel-cut oats requires a 25 minute simmer, for example).
We overheard every call because it was cubicle after cubicle in one big room. But hey! Let's complain about the customer that we just overheard you talking to for 30 minutes. Let's relive it after every call. Man.
Hey yeah, let's have our personal cell phone alert tone be a Linkin Park song at the loudest possible volume and always leave on their desk next to you. What a hell hole.
Micromanagement? You got it! You haven't experienced pedantry until you've met my supervisor. If you misspeak a word he pretends to not understand what you mean until you've re-spoken it in a way he understands. Now that we converse over chat/email almost entirely that ridiculous behavior has subsided.
They rarely cleaned the bathrooms thoroughly. One urinal. One stall. Just gross.
Microwave encrusted with who knows what. Janitors don't clean microwaves I guess?
I'm not one of those people that has very specific temperature needs. But of course we had one of those people that was very underweight in the office that needed it to be much warmer than normal. Why can't those people just wear more layers of clothing and not make the rest us suffer in sweat?
Parking? Okay that was close. If you can find a spot. I will never go back to the office. I will also quit my job first.
I am way more productive at home. I have ADHD and the distraction of an office environment is too much and makes it hard for me to concentrate. My productivity has never been higher. I don't dread going to work, I get paid enough that I do not need to find a better place. And I have been a remote worker since 2011 and never, ever want to go back to work in an office.
I feel like this is the key thing.
Instead of mandating blanket policies (whatever they are) that might not make sense for every team, trust your employees to self-organize in the way that makes the most sense for them and the way they work.
I'm in the same boat, and like you, doubt I will want to work any other way again.
If you are a pro-WFO person on a team that offers flexibility to WFH or WFO, but nearly everyone but you is WFH, then what do you do?
In contrast if you are a pro-WFH person but the rest of your team is in the office, you probably don’t care as much because the benefits you gain from WFH aren’t dependent on your coworkers.
It’s mesmerizing to me how so many think office life is a necessity for data entry work
Nevermind open source developers building the software world we rely on via email for decades.
When covid struck initially, I kept my kid home with me. My job, aside from a daily standup and a weekly meeting, could be done while juggling my child. I worked really odd hours, bc I could. Early AM, later at night. But I got to protect my kid and my family from a disease I didn't know much about, for 15 months.
My new job disallows me to juggle him but it's still WFH. He started school anyways.
I exercise more. I meditate more. Go outside more - get little chores done, cut the grass on my lunch break rather than cutting in on family time.
The lack of a 45-115 min commute each way has been a lifesaver. Going to the doctor is faster and less time consuming bc my docs are near my home and not near my work. I can jog in the morning and still be to work "on time" rather than having to get up earlier and trade exercise for sleep.
And what's more.. When I do break, I get to see my wife. Or talk to my parents on the phone. At lunch I can catch up on a TV show, a podcast, a YouTube vid, that I'm interested in but my family might not be.
It affords me more ability to access my personal computer for things I might not do on a company machine.
I can do training videos and obligatory but time pointless and wasting meetings that never ask for my participation while in my "poor man's sauna" (hot bath + space heater in the room) or on a exercise bike or while walking around the block.
I miss being around people I like at work.
But alas.. I don't like anyone at my new job even a little
imagine working for an employer that treats you like a human being.
I don't think in-person real-time communication is always effective. No, I personally think it's one of the least method of communication that can happen in an office environment when the topic gets slightly complex (that is, if the topic is complex enough for you to write a memo about it).
For those topics, I love to communicate with some "written" form, such as in an email, posts etc. Because doing the "writing" part allow me to conduct some research and analyses on the topic (usually took 10 minutes), which will in turn increase the quality of my reply.
If you standing right in front of me and asked a question that require a complex answer, then my reply will probably make me look like an idiot, because I might not able to discover all the information that I need to process and output within 30 seconds. Not very effective in my opinion.
Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept.
Oh, and did I say that this interruption and talking for a long time seems to get ten time worse over video calls for some reason – perhaps because Bob finds it easier to pontificate while in his pajamas compared to having to stand up and talk in front of his peers in the office.
Yeah, I know the standard retort for this is "your meeting must have an agenda" et cetera. Guess what, look at the last 5 meetings on your calendar and tell me truthfully how many of them have a real agenda (mindlessly repeating the title as the description doesn't count). People don't want to do it, because, guess what, it adds an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time.
So, I have found that just going the whole way and just having the entire communication asynchronously is often better at ensuring more equitable participation.
One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking. Then he would reintroduce the subject and if they again tried to take over this boss would literally say "We've heard what you had to say, but XYZ wanted the say something as well". More than just stopping the disruptive behavior you have to acknowledge it and make it clear something else will happen now.
True story. I've seen it happen over and over again, and it's one of the many reasons why I would be very reluctant to become an employee ever again.
Oh, the difficultly of getting people to think about things in advance. The number of meetings where it's clear that basically nobody has actually put any thought in, done any research, even read the entire meeting invitation.
Meetings become a way to force people to spend time on a topic, and the act of being there where everyone can see them means they can't goof off and do something else again.
Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.
If I was Bob's manager I would have a clear conversation with him about his behaviour, and I would - at minimum - make sure that everyone on the team has a chance to present their ideas without interruption.
This happens in Zoom meetings and phone calls all the time too. It’s even worse in remote land when it happens.
I have been “Bob” some times, but it was not out of ego.
Sometimes a meeting is called because there is a problem that doesn’t fall neatly into existing organizational buckets and the company is doing a scavenger hunt to identify existing domain experts. If you’re that domain expert, your role in that meeting is to quickly establish that fact and work to bring everyone to a shared understanding of the issue, possible causes, and possible solutions.
Also, sometimes meetings are not called for a conversation, they are called for an information broadcast that requires people’s undivided attention because alignment and understanding needs to be established before work can continue.
I have been on both the receiving end of “Bob”, and stuck being “Bob”. But, to your point having a good agenda is crucial, partly to frame things ahead of time so meeting participants know if this is a broadcast, a conversation, or a scavenger hunt. For the latter, most importantly because maybe “Bob” knows that “Linda” is the foremost expert on X and should have been invited.
While this is a great point, I wouldn't say it is just narcissists and egoists. I spent quite a lot of meetings before being the "Jane" or just sitting waiting for people to end until I learned to cut off and intersect at a point, but I spent quite a lot of the time wondering why some people keep on talking and have noticed a few categories.
1. ) We got the narcissists and egoists. Some talk because they love to talk and hear themselves, some love the attention, some talk because they think only their opinion is worthy.
2.) We got "look how smart I am" talkers - Wouldn't put them in the first category, but these people will usually take a point other participants make, say it differently then start explaining it to prove themselves smart. Fits more under the category below, but is a category of its own since it can also be not from insecurity, but "smarter than thou" attitude.
3. ) We got insecure ones - some people start talking with the good intent of trying to offer useful information, but due to their insecurities they start overly-explaining it and rambling off since they keep waiting for someone to intersect and give them approval. You can usually notice them by the anxious rush to talk and weird "uhhh..ah...and...umm" breaks where they are checking for feedback from the audience, and if they dont get it, they continue talking.
4. ) The "breadth-first explainers" - These people are trying to communicate their idea or vision, but their method of communication is breadth-first explaining. Unfortunately, instead of "We can do A and B" they wander of into explaining everything related to every point in-between A and B. Example:
"We just need to make a HTTP Request... So we can make a POST call here - POST is the type of request that creates data - like POST with the new name, surname, title or it can be anything like the whole model, a file... other request serve for other purposes, you have GET.... (10 minutes later).. So we will make the client - this can be the phone, computer, watch - send the data to the server.."
They suck to have in meetings when its all about ideating and innovating. They are great to have in meetings when stuff is known and needs to be explained to customers/people out of context.
5. ) The managers - I call them the managers because they either call the meetings to discuss nothing or make sure the meeting is spend discussing irrelevant or tangentially relevant topics instead of dealing with the actual topics. They usually take someones question or answer to go off into unrelated, often philosophical topics. Still not sure why some do it and is it insecurity, showing off or just the lack of social awareness.
6.) The sellers - I'd put them with narcissists, but they deserve a category of their own. These people usually have something they want to sell or a narrative they want to push. They will wander off into stories that support their cause, taking up as much time as possible of the meeting to minimise time available to resist the sell. A lot of these usually work as sales and when the meeting is over, it's either their way or "lets continue the discussion some other time".
Discussion in meetings has felt mostly useless to me over the years for the exact reasons that the parent pointed out. On the other hand, some of the best work I've done was at a job where the person I worked with most had the same train ride home as me, so we'd just chat for half an hour 2-3x a week. It allowed both of us to work through ideas, and come to much stronger conclusions.
Face-to-Face conversation can also happen remote synchronous.
In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results.
I think the reality of face to face meetings is that the result is often almost predetermined based on the existing group dynamics. How many people are turning up to the meeting feeling their input will make a difference versus people with (probably) the dominant personalities who are happy their established conclusion is chosen. And seeing the later as naturally coming to a better conclusion, faster.
As a dominant personality in meetings I definitely think about the effects of that a bunch.
> In my experience, having "group reasoning" is faster and with better results.
Why is face-to-face required for "group reasoning"?
I've felt like "group reasoning" in person is more like getting people on the same page to execute on an idea, which doesn't equate with the merit of that idea.
Once that discussion kicks off in a large-ish group, I've found it hard to pivot the direction of that conversation - if you think there's a better, independent solution that's not aligned with the group train of thought.
Speed is not a proxy for decision quality. It's almost always the opposite.
Very few technical topics require quick forth and back. Writing is more effective communication.
For example, our team used to have a 15 minute standup meeting every day, where we would go around and give our status updates. Many people complained that most of the time, the information being shared wasn’t relevant to them. We replaced it with a daily Slack thread where people could share their updates. Then, in the 15-minute meeting people could ask any questions they had or bring up anything they wanted to discuss more. This resulted in the daily standup meetings becoming a much more effective use of everyone’s time.
That and to me at least almost more important is the ability to refer back to history.
You have a little oral discussion with your co-workers about an issue, or maybe ask for some clarification on something etc. Then a few days later when you think you need that info again, it's gone.
Having a discussion in Slack, Mattermost, email, etc allows me to always refer back and see what we've been talking about. Which can be vital especially in those situations where we're talking about complex issues with complex answers. The fact that I can a week later go back and see the same clarification again, is definitely helpful
If you plan to work on/with web frameworks, advertisements, data science, or pure CS topics for your whole career, then there's probably no excuse to force you to come into the office 5 days a week. But good luck doing that as a software engineer at a company like SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, AMD, defense contractors, etc., let alone as any other kind of STEM professional. I think it's an important distinction to make. For me personally, some of the coolest work I can imagine doing is likely going to be done in the office/lab for the foreseeable future.
I know defense contractors that are working from home. Two of them did so before the pandemic too - remoting into hardware they're not allowed to physically touch even if they were in the lab!
A neighbour is a civil engineer and the huge screens he needed to do his job were only in the office. Now that he's moved that huge screen (and I mean massive, it's like a telly), the office have told him that he only needs to go into the office to meet clients.
I have a product design dear friend who bought himself a Prusa 3D printer and now can pretty much 100% WFH. He prefers it because he no longer has to share resources.
A neighbour is a network engineer and he spent 2020 decommissioning hardware in the server room and moving it into the cloud - something he said was inevitable for his business but the pandemic hastened it. He now WFH pretty much 100% of the time.
I know someone who works for a SSD manufacturer in the states and they WFH most of the week.
All the web/data devs I know WFH pretty much full time - except one but only because his boss is draconian.
90% of the software I write works just fine in an emulator. We don't even have nearly enough hardware to give every engineer access.
As it should be. Investing some effort in my development environment has paid back every time.
This is the problem I always run into too. An emulator should be standard on any system development program that has software interacting with hardware.
Yes, we work with various forms of pre- and post-silicon devices but you will find that either they can be accessed remotely, or you can send them by courier to whoever needs one.
So, sure, _some_ people need to be in the lab touching the hardware, especially during bringup, but the immense majority of the people, the immense majority of the time, can work remotely.
I think you are overestimating the requirement to touch the hardware by few order of magnitude for a software engineer there. Just yesterday I was reading a linkedin post from some senior electrical engineer in Apple M1 division and how they achieved everything remotely. For a fabless company, I don't think most of the engineers would need to touch the chip. Similarly for Tesla and SpaceX, they had great two years when almost all software engineers were working remotely.
It was a fun day; I got to wear a bunny suit and a headset and climb around inside a space ship.
But there are people like me, people who do touch hardware.. at home. My desk is full of hardware. Behind me there's another desk with an oscilloscope, lab psu, dmm, electric load, a pile of probes, a soldering station..
It's not like we get new hardware every day, and when we do, it's not a big deal to wait a day or two for the courier to bring a prototype to my home.
There are sibling comments here that mention the same, however, to add my own point here: I'm involved in a complex hardware plus software project which involves designing and doing a board bring-up for an Arm SoC Linux-based device. We need to visit the office only once in two to three weeks. For the board bring-up when we do not have the provision to provide the hardware to our software engineer yet, we have someone in the office connect the UART lines to it and have the typical VPN+SSH set up to perform the board bring-up for it.
Generally speaking, the engineers that are required for the labs would be electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Also, even for these physical-based engineering disciplines, a lot of design is highly computer based thanks to great CAD, simulation, and future-looking generative design software from the likes of Autodesk, Ansys, etc. That being said, I personally feel that being in person really can help in the epiphany process for hardware-based projects.
Eg if you are a civil engineer, lots of your work is spent doing calculations and designing things. When you do touch hardware, it's usually 'on site' and not at the office.
You dont need to be anywhere specific to read a data sheet
One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.
There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals.
I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I might take it. After all, where else are you going to see the most advanced weaponry in the history of mankind?
The title of this article perhaps indicates a move from 1 to 3 or 4 but its content discusses 2. All the information I've seen is that business are definitely moving more to 2 than 3 or 4, though some do see this a just a first step.
Its a big difference for the future of cities as 2 is more 'coastal historic town just outside the city', 3 is more 'small town in the same part of the world' and 4 is more 'move to thailand'.
2 is still a local workforce with visas and taxation where 4 is a global workforce available anywhere with a base level of infrastructure, and little taxation for service-based business until there is greater international cooperation.
I'm trying to figure out if my current remote job is fixed hours. Nobody has ever asked me or said anything about the hours I work, but I am expected to be present for meetings, which usually occur in the middle of the day for me. Is that tier 3 or 4?
Also of note: you can have in-office work with the same flexible hours schemes.
I'd say we're 4s more than 3s. I would say that an agreed upon, regular meeting doesn't dictate your set hours--just a single obligation that you all agreed to.
Our company operates as a 4 tier and I've been here for going on 7 years now. We still have to get on a daily standup call at a fixed time every day, and I still have to participate in other scheduled obligations (mainly tech calls with customers), but the rest of the time is mine to allocate as I see fit.
Also, there are consequences with "no fixed hours" that lots of humans are incapable of dealing with. The amount of discipline it requires to manage this freedom is not insignificant. This said, I am not against multitasking. If you can have something rolling while you get your work done, fuckin awesome. I don't care. I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
I've had these scenarios in a 9-5 office job - eg. someone merged in some shit that broke migrations, CI takes forever to run so they don't catch it, the next day they are off and now I'm there touching systems I know little about just to revert my setup to a working state.
I think if you can't rely on people in your team to be professional/competent it's going to be shit no matter where you work. That being said managing flexible work hours is really hard, it's especially hard if you're bad at estimating how much is acceptable to deliver in some time frame. If you always give estimates based on what you're capable at your ideal 8 work hours you're going to sink a lot more time than 8 hours a day - especially if you allow yourself to be distracted. I try to give my estimates based on 4 productive hours per day.
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Wow, how out of touch and patronizing is this? How about, it’s hard to concentrate in these cheap open-plan offices where you have to listen to every other conversation in the vicinity?
https://heeris.id.au/trinkets/ProgrammerInterrupted.png
This plus the "make your own schedule" organization that installs itself after the first weeks/months, and you can finally reach the peace of mind one, as an individual, needs to thrive.
That being said, I can understand the reluctance of the management, since they're basically losing control of both time and space of their teams. Which can be quite scary if you're not prepared.
But hey, managerial inertia should be fought if everyone else is happy.
I have 2x 27" 1440p IPS screens at home, which is just perfect for coding. The single 24" 1080p screen is not going to cut it at the office.
At home I'm also using my desktop (rysen-based + nvme) pc for work and it feels about 10x faster than the macbook air they supply (which I haven't done real work on for the last year). I'm also using a Logitech G815 + Logitech G102 with a massive mouse pad. My desk has been lowered (I've cut the legs shorter to an exact height) to a point where my knees/legs are in the air to allow blood flow. I also have an electric foot warmer for the winter months (pet heating pad in a nice cover). Other than that, nicer headphones + speakers + studio microphone and overall desk aesthetics...So I want to see them replicate my very comfortable setup that I have at home vs the office. Also having fiber at home without silly restrictions.
In the end after some 1-2 decaedes we'd wake up in much flatter world with perhaps reasons to not impose limits on labour mobility across borders.
What makes you think that this adjustments for cost of living would persist? Competitive pressures are towards paying for productivity, not for cost of living.
> In the end after some 1-2 decades we'd wake up in much flatter world with perhaps reasons to not impose limits on labour mobility across borders.
I am not so sure about that. I share your hope for a flatter world, but I think that wage differentials are _not_ why people want to restrict migration. It's just a somewhat socially acceptable excuse that's sometimes given, but people will come up with other excuses as necessary.
My main evidence for this view is that migration from comparatively rich countries is not all that freer in most places. (And economically, migration from poorer countries doesn't make the receiving country poorer either, but people don't believe that.)
I think there is not a lot of competitive pressure, if there was, the salaries in Europe and Canada would already match the US ones. It's another thing that the COL is quickly converging, especially in big cities. Goods already cost pretty much the same (adjusted for local taxes), services and housing vary a lot and remote work allows to arbitrage them. So in medium term you'll have an option to work from Zurich at $$$ or from anywhere at XX % less (the option I'd pick).
I have yet to see a reasonable argument for restricting migration, perhaps this would be a good topic for ASK HN? All economic arguments show free movement would lead to better labour (and capital) allocation.