During my early days in my tech career. I joined a small tech firm that did linux kernel programming and embedded stuff. It was my first job out of college and I was really excited. My mentor was a 50+ guy whom I walked everyday from work to back my home. It didn't started out like that, we would leave work around different times and one day it was raining, so we waited and then it became sort of habit. I learned so much about programming and life in general. Made me a better programmer for sure. I'm always grateful!
With remote, everything has to be highly intentional. Schedule a meeting means having a pre-defined time, often there is a specific topic of conversation in mind, people diligently stick to that topic as much as possible to respect everyone's calendar etc. Collaboration tends to play out within these extremely narrow parameters that are unnatural to hundreds of years of human social development. It doesn't help that the best substitute - video conferencing - still strips a lot of crucial information that you're used to getting in person for modulating conversation (eg. ability to scan body language and facial expressions of people in the room as you talk) and find moments to interject.
But lately I've been going into office and the throughput of technical discussions is just an order of magnitude higher than in video calls or over Slack.
Someone once said all my friends are like me, they all hate people.
I would have never met any of them WFH. Anecdotes aside, we’re a much better species in person enforcing social behaviors than maximizing antisocial behavior for some optimization argument.
If WFH was productive, this websites front page would be nothing but studies proving that. It’s been four years and… nothing.
Nobody is even writing documentation now, so you can’t even tell the kids to RTFM.
That's more like good mentoring, which doesn't always depend on being in the office, it can work remote as well if the mentors are good at it and want to do it. A year ago I left a shitty toxic office job where there was no such thing as mentoring either way, least of all remote.
Feels like quality mentoring is a lost art these days, especially amongst the SW industry of today of younger generation of workers and companies, where the average life of a piece of code is measured in months, and tenure in the company is around 2-3 years, nobody bothered with training since the code would be obsolete, you'd be gone soon anyway or they'd loose the only guy who still loved teaching others.
Everything now is "just look it up on the (outdated) Wiki or figure it out on your own".
> Things like this is the reason I don't work from home. Those little moments of contact.
I, too, miss this. However, 2 things that work against me currently - my company has _mandated_ in-office time, which was not the deal when I joined so is an active reason to NOT go, and I live 30 miles/1 hour away from it, as do many. One of my colleagues is 2.5 hours away, across a time zone.
So the office is extremely 'dead' in culture/atmosphere, providing the bare minimum to get work done, and is a glass-walled fishbowl in a shared office space with a GIANT (think, measured in meters/yards) TV display in the courtyard that we can see. Indeed, one can't NOT see it.
While I enjoy the time with the people there, there's zero "serendipity" of the place since most everyone goes by fiat, not choice, and spends most of their energy on trying to remove the constant distractions.
C-Level: We want culture!
us: You removed every possible input that would make it work.
C: But we want it!
u: give us an office space with some private areas + some collaborative as-needed areas.
These kind of things aren't really summarizable into a quick bite is my experience. It's because of the subtle nuances, the way an experienced person approaches a problem.
His office was not a multi-storey air-conditioned open plan aquarium where 30-something idiots commuting from the leafy counties of Kent want to discuss how they got pissed last night and who feel compelled to bond with software devs by showing them the latest "take a selfie and see it mapped onto a baboon arse" app. I would love to have the opportunity to go on walks with a mentor, but the only available ones are frustrated, scared managers who think of themselves as thought leaders or aloof top managers/founders who think of themselves as geniuses when they are a) well-connected public school crowd keeping the riffraff out of their lives, b) clever, but not genius operators happy to ride their teams to the ground to cover up lack of planning. The best I could get out of them is beers on a Thursday night. Thanks.
I wonder what caused all this madness. Doesn't it degrade productivity? And thereby hurt profitability? And thereby the attractiveness of such strategies?
It sometimes seem to me like profit motive has been replaced by a power motive, like money isn't real anymore, but the legitimacy of private ownership is.
Basically aristocracy 2.0.
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and why there aren't competitive alternatives in an otherwise free market.
Trust fund kids do not need to work, they just choose to do so and they like to watch lower management jump up trying to catch the carrot dangled in front of them. Aristocracy never disappeared only it took them a while to learn how to use modern inventions. Look at who's working as a "trustee" for a lot of projects and watch how everyone is trying to lick their arse in the most imaginative ways.
Around that time Oppenheimer became the director of the Institute of Advanced Studies where this took place. His idea was to invite there various talented people, giving them grants to work on whatever they wish. Most of them were in science, but he also managed to get T. S. Eliot.
Article adds that they walked to office at 10-11, walked home FROM office at 1-2 (so they spent at most 3 hours at the institute) and in effect this took up 30% of Einstein's workday.
If anything, it's subtle "do what you love" propaganda.
99% of working population doesn't have Albert Einstein's brilliance in order to provide the same kind of value with 3h of "office work" per day.
Plus I think Albert Einstein and other scientists like him were constantly working in their heads anyway, constantly thinking about how to solve that problem, regardless of how much time they spent in an office. So trying to deduct some kind of productivity metric between his office time and results would be pointless (it's pointless for most knowledge jobs, but especially for his.)
Counting the number of hours in science does not really matter. This work is full of incredibly productive eureka minutes in the middle of unlucky boring days or weeks of stunted progress. Scientists don't stop thinking on the problems when they go home. Some significant advances happened even by scientists while dreaming. In some cases sleeping time definitely should count as hours on office, having in mind the results.
If we could remove the bureaucracy load from them, scientists could work even less hours without losing productivity or even increasing it (See: Stephen Hawking).
So, they walked to campus together, spent about two hours there, then walked home together. It sounds more like just sharing a long daily walk with a stopover at the office.
bonding over walks is actually one of the best ways of communicating your thoughts with the other person. ofc I don't have any research or anything to back it up, but whenever i hit a blocker in life, i take a walk with my bestfriend in and around the college campus. 99% of the problem is solved by the end of it. however if i do the same thing elsewhere, like our room or some place to eat, the flow of thoughts isn't that coherent or fruitful. maybe the active work of walking stimulates our brains to think out stuff properly.
When you're 67 and basically retired (as Einstein was at this time)?
By contrast, in his 20s, he wrote 4 highly-influential papers in a single year, in his spare time while also working full-time at the Swiss patent office.
You can flush your cache to relax. It takes effort. Usually 2 days of different activities.
I schedule 2-3 days at home, just lazying in front of TV or playing games to flush job out of my brain before starting vacations, to prevent carrying job over to the vacation and spoiling it.
10 hour work weeks are 520 work hours in a year. Even if you get paid $100 per hour, you’d have to heavily rely on govt benefits to support your family. (Avg. non subsidized health insurance costs for a family of 4 are $24000/year)
Readit News
But lately I've been going into office and the throughput of technical discussions is just an order of magnitude higher than in video calls or over Slack.
I wish this wasn't the case.
I would have never met any of them WFH. Anecdotes aside, we’re a much better species in person enforcing social behaviors than maximizing antisocial behavior for some optimization argument.
If WFH was productive, this websites front page would be nothing but studies proving that. It’s been four years and… nothing.
Nobody is even writing documentation now, so you can’t even tell the kids to RTFM.
Feels like quality mentoring is a lost art these days, especially amongst the SW industry of today of younger generation of workers and companies, where the average life of a piece of code is measured in months, and tenure in the company is around 2-3 years, nobody bothered with training since the code would be obsolete, you'd be gone soon anyway or they'd loose the only guy who still loved teaching others.
Everything now is "just look it up on the (outdated) Wiki or figure it out on your own".
I, too, miss this. However, 2 things that work against me currently - my company has _mandated_ in-office time, which was not the deal when I joined so is an active reason to NOT go, and I live 30 miles/1 hour away from it, as do many. One of my colleagues is 2.5 hours away, across a time zone.
So the office is extremely 'dead' in culture/atmosphere, providing the bare minimum to get work done, and is a glass-walled fishbowl in a shared office space with a GIANT (think, measured in meters/yards) TV display in the courtyard that we can see. Indeed, one can't NOT see it.
While I enjoy the time with the people there, there's zero "serendipity" of the place since most everyone goes by fiat, not choice, and spends most of their energy on trying to remove the constant distractions.
C-Level: We want culture!
us: You removed every possible input that would make it work.
C: But we want it!
u: give us an office space with some private areas + some collaborative as-needed areas.
C: But $$ tho.
u: <shrug>
C: But we want Culture!
The time I can put to work is limited. The flexibility is useful.
I get juniors need to learn, but I also need to do work other than teach. We don't have this 1:1 Jedi pairing nonsense.
There's more of them than there are of me/peers, capitalization is robbery. Either another junior or the whole business loses.
It's something to dial in. Both in terms of means and amount. There is never a perfect prescription. We must all adapt.
There were probably a few billion fewer people in the world when handholding mentorship was common
I wonder what caused all this madness. Doesn't it degrade productivity? And thereby hurt profitability? And thereby the attractiveness of such strategies?
It sometimes seem to me like profit motive has been replaced by a power motive, like money isn't real anymore, but the legitimacy of private ownership is. Basically aristocracy 2.0.
I'd be happy to hear your thoughts on this, and why there aren't competitive alternatives in an otherwise free market.
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If anything, it's subtle "do what you love" propaganda.
Plus I think Albert Einstein and other scientists like him were constantly working in their heads anyway, constantly thinking about how to solve that problem, regardless of how much time they spent in an office. So trying to deduct some kind of productivity metric between his office time and results would be pointless (it's pointless for most knowledge jobs, but especially for his.)
If we could remove the bureaucracy load from them, scientists could work even less hours without losing productivity or even increasing it (See: Stephen Hawking).
By contrast, in his 20s, he wrote 4 highly-influential papers in a single year, in his spare time while also working full-time at the Swiss patent office.
I schedule 2-3 days at home, just lazying in front of TV or playing games to flush job out of my brain before starting vacations, to prevent carrying job over to the vacation and spoiling it.
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