I am still absolutely baffled at how they don't realize how much more productive most people are at home. Where I work we have to go in 2x a week and those days are just PACKED with meetings, or on campus activities planned by management, etc. Barely any work gets done by anyone, it's ridiculous.
Forget productivity for a second (it's a fool's errand to make any claims here)-- WFH means you're able to retain top talent even as they move to non tech hubs. For a variety of reasons folks need to live outside tech hubs and limiting yourself to the bay area (or seattle). Good staff+ engineers are very rare as it is.
It’s wild to me that people don’t consider meetings work. Does everyone else work at a place where they’re told exactly what to build and they never have to talk to anyone else about what they’re building?
It's wild to me that you don't seem to realize around 75% of meetings could have been a short email. Meetings are where middle management gets to strut their stuff, and by stuff I mean the latest stupid trend stemming from what amounts to a self help book for organizations. Where "people engineers" get to waste everyone's time with "team building". Where productivity goes to die. The meetings that matter and actually contribute to actionable decisions in my experience no one bitches about. That isn't what most meetings are.
It's just a question of proportions. If people organize meetings that are not directly related to my tasks, enforce camera on policy and so on, they are not respecting my time and negatively impacting my productivity. On the other hand, calls with my team about the tasks at hand are extremely useful and can save a lot of typing. And usually they are quite short unless we decide the problem is so hard we need to work on it together, which rarely happens.
Every time I’m back in the office, it’s like the last few weeks of repressed communication and collaboration all comes out. So we spend very little time grinding away solo, but all these little details and knowledge sharing all occur and it’s highly valuable even if it didn’t directly relate to jira tickets moved on that day.
Discrete individual contributions on individual days do not represent company wide performance. The people I know who are going in to the office are surrounded by junior employees who have no idea what's going on. The people I know who think they're more productive say they've "avoided interruptions" which are by and large productive for the company.
These large corporations aren't making decisions without the data. In fact, they tried this experiment for years and the results are in: full-remote is less productive.
That's not to say specific people shouldn't be remote. There's probably an optimal distribution that allows some slack for these ICs who are bad at being in the office.
When we all went remote during the pandemic, we were told by senior leadership that our productivity had measurably increased.
Now they want us back in a few days a month, which isn't too bad I guess. But it really has nothing to do with productivity.
We do less work when we commute, socialise more, don't accept early or late meetings, etc. Our teams are distributed across India, the UK, the EU and the US. Most of our actual work takes place on webex calls, even pre pandemic.
Now, it may be that the leadership value intangible things like culture and have decided that those are also important things. But at least for our company, productivity is not the reason they want us back sometimes.
It is doubtful they have robust objective data. Much more likely, a suit asked someone to get data to justify RTO, someone found some metrics that look better within people who RTO'd voluntarily, and they are using it to justify their hypothesis without anyone having the balls/organizational clout to push back critically.
Place I work at ended up dropping all juniors because they hadn’t got up to speed after a year and a bit.
Personally I find myself thinking “I need to discuss this thing with this person, but I don’t feel like booking in a meeting and having a video call, I’ll just wait until we see each other in the office some time”
Who the heck downloads apps these days for every stupid thing? I mean apart from clueless grannies who would gladly send some money to that poor Nigerian prince over and over again.
I've stopped quite some time ago, basically my collection of apps is set in stone once I configure a new phone. If something seismic happens in real world I may add app in average rate 1 app/year, and that's about it.
Not using apps is so cool, some crappy webs that don't support mobile firefox with ublock origin don't even get my time, the rest is well curated. Due to reasons behind I am more than fine clicking on consent popups, the way they are designed to get to reject consent dialog tells you outright how moral/amoral business is behind it. So this is actually time-saving feature.
The thing is, life is short. No, its darn short, ask any old person. Definitely too short to waste too much of it on regretful things like phones.
not really a big deal for them considering they have the big bucks to buy a nice home 5 min from the office, or you know, pay for a car service to drive them.
This, and most of the recession was manufactured to take worker power away that was gained during WFH/pandemic times. It's not a coincidence that the FAANG companies were fined a combined 45M (chump change to them) when caught colluding to stagnant tech worker wages. I almost guarantee they colluded in layoffs/getting people to RTO.
I made and operate a small app called [FishHarmony](https://www.fishharmony.com/). It's a simple app for iPhone that tells you what fish species (fresh or salt, I offer both) are compatible with fish of different species! So if you want to see if Tetras get along with Rasboras, for example, you can check my app/website! I've done no marketing and get something ~200 active users per month and 1K+ downloads lifetime. Not much, but still cool that people are using it!
I pay about 7/month for a Heroku instance and the stupid $99 a year for the App Store. Working on some freemium apps that will hopefully offset those costs.
as someone who has an aquarium, i'm amazed it didn't happen in the middle of the night. Any time I've had an overflow issue or something, it's always in the middle of the night and my water sensor is blaring
I’m renting a house with three bathrooms. Two of the three toilets, on separate occasions, spontaneously cracked and leaked water. Both happened between 5am and 6am-ish. I was awake for one and heard it, and woke up shortly after the other one happened and found my kitchen flooded. The cracks in the two toilet water tanks were identical. Given the comments about the water temp and lobby temps, I’m guessing that hour and temperature changes could be linked.
I was able to get the owner of the house to see the wisdom of replacing the third toilet water tank.
+1 here, and yeah it's definitely not just white men. Where I work, it's ALL Indian or Asian, you'd be hard pressed to even find white people where I work that are actually in engineering.
