Back to the Office for Tech Workers

[sdrealtor]

[quote=spdrun]

This startup is building a remote configurable hearing diagnostic and hear aid system. The concept is to allow some elderly in the rural/remote community with limited mobility and unable to reach hear specialistics to have access to top hearing specialists that live elsewhere (IE urban areas)…

Two things:

(1) What’s to stop the companies from pushing laws that allow the specialists to be outsourced abroad or automated away? This sounds like a jobkiller long-term.

(2) People who need hearing aids should also have a checkup for other organic causes of hearing loss … a hearing aid could be hiding the real problem that’s damaging hearing long-term.[/quote]

I know quite a bit about that. The nature of the test and patient history dictates whether there could be another issue behind it. Most commonly it is sudden loss of hearing not chronic decline. Easily referred and differentiated

[JPJones]

[quote=Coronita][quote=JPJones][quote=spdrun]

The key is not to force your preference on others.

The problem is that employers will start pushing from-home work on people who DON’T want it (like myself – I’ve learned to LOATHE working from home full-time) if the industry allows for it. Why? It saves them on office costs, and if people have all the tools needed to work from home, there are suddenly no boundaries between home and work. Welcome to 24/7 on-call Hell.[/quote]

Yeah, that’s tricky. Since my wife switched to remote 2 years ago, we’ve had to get a lot more strict about setting boundaries with work. She used to check Slack occasionally while idling on the couch outside of working hours. Little things like that were cut out pretty early on, else she ended up doing a lot of little work sessions during family time. If you aren’t good at setting those boundaries, remote work might not be right for you.[/quote]

There’s a tradeoff between flexibility and taking calls outside of your timezone. We’ve had a few years to refine things but it’s pretty simple.

We have a planned short morning “standup” meeting at 9am PST in the morning and a meeting in the afternoon at 2pm PST. If you’re not in the PST timezone, you either have to be available at those times OR you must have someone covering for you.

You are not to respond to slack or team messages past your 6pm in your timezone, unless you are happen to be the engineer on call for a production launch week. At which there’s a rotation schedule across US timezone and asia, so at most you’ll be on call for +2hrs from 6pm until the other team takes over.

Managers and above are exempt and expected to attend corporate meetings as early 7am PST when needed because there are times you’ll need to get on a call with the east coast team… The flipside is there are days that things get quiet by the time it’s 3pm PST (because everyone on the east coast it’s already 6pm). So some days, I’m off by 3:30pm PST, just in time to volunteer for my kid’s robotics team.

No one is allowed to ring personal mobile numbers. Everyone is expected to message in slack or teams, and if you’re on call, you need to have slack/teams on your phone and logged in.

If you don’t respond during hours, don’t check in your code or submit a PR or show up for a code review, design meeting. You will get tarred and feathered over slack and teams by your teammates and get shit on by them.

Managers and above have learned here to use the “Scheduled messages” after hours, if they want to put something in a slack channel that is not meant to be actioned upon until the next business day. Before, I wasn’t doing this, people were thinking I was expecting a response off-hours and finally people complained to me about it. I didn’t expect people to respond off-hours.. I just didn’t want forget and posted it in the slack channel meant for tomorrow.

My philosophy is don’t be a dick to people on your team. And one day if you end up working for one of them, (hopefully) you won’t work for a dick.[/quote]

That’s all about par for the course at my wife’s company, too. I especially like the bit about scheduled messages. Letting after-hours messages from bossmang sit overnight causes anxiety.

[svelte]

[quote=scaredyclassic]

Telemedicine will be commonplace, I don’t think that trend will reverse. My wife’s doing it. It’s very very VERY efficient. Having bodies late and milling about an office slows things down. Obviously some issues will require physical presence, but a shocking number do not.

38x more telehealth encounters than prepandemic…but now stabilizing…
[/quote]

I worked for a startup producing telemed software over two decades ago. Turns out the world was not ready for it at that time. Not just from a social perspective from a legal angle as well. Looks like the world is now ready!

If anything postive has come from this whole pandemic period, it is that it forced the business and government communities to rethink their positions on the workplace and what can be done remotely. And that is a great thing.

[barnaby33]

Deadzone you really do have an axe to grind. Wow, primadonnas? I don’t know about the rest of the tech industry but I am straight of back, white of tooth and above all modest.

I offered you a rebuttal and then you said it was irrelevant. You sir are veering off into incoherence. I may be wrong but I’ve been around in tech a long time. Salaries aren’t actually that high now. During the 90’s contract software engineers (more senior than me at the time but certainly less so than me now) could regularly find 100+/hr contracts. Those are few and far between these days. Plus the cost of living has what tripled? Salaries have really stagnated and compressed. Sure a college grad now gets 80k to start but trying to find jobs above 140k is still difficult. I think you think that everyone works at FAANG or that’s the impression I get.
Josh

[barnaby33]

Oh and I for one am not going back to an office unless forced to. If there is a bloodbath in tech it won’t last forever and my first jump would be from an office to remote, if I were so coerced.
Josh

[sdrealtor]

[quote=barnaby33]Oh and I for one am not going back to an office unless forced to. If there is a bloodbath in tech it won’t last forever and my first jump would be from an office to remote, if I were so coerced.
Josh[/quote]

WFH certainly presents advantages for decanting one’s dinner wine

[barnaby33]

Stop being so Protestant! Wine isn’t just for dinner anymore!
Josh

[scaredyclassic]

I would be very sad never going to an office.

I want to see all the people.

[spdrun]

^^^ Kidding, or are you an outlier out of all tech workers?

[Coronita]

[quote=spdrun]^^^ Kidding, or are you an outlier out of all tech workers?[/quote]

Scaredy is a lawyer, dude.

[Anonymous]

[quote=barnaby33]Deadzone you really do have an axe to grind. Wow, primadonnas? I don’t know about the rest of the tech industry but I am straight of back, white of tooth and above all modest.

I offered you a rebuttal and then you said it was irrelevant. You sir are veering off into incoherence. I may be wrong but I’ve been around in tech a long time. Salaries aren’t actually that high now. During the 90’s contract software engineers (more senior than me at the time but certainly less so than me now) could regularly find 100+/hr contracts. Those are few and far between these days. Plus the cost of living has what tripled? Salaries have really stagnated and compressed. Sure a college grad now gets 80k to start but trying to find jobs above 140k is still difficult. I think you think that everyone works at FAANG or that’s the impression I get.
Josh[/quote]

You tech guys have reading comprehension issues. I said the prima-donnas are the ones who threaten to quit if “forced” to work from the office a couple times a week. Think their skills are so unique, rare and irreplaceable that they can get any job they want. I see a lot of this attitude lately and it reminds me of the late 90s when engineers were hopping between multiple startups every few months chasing higher salary and stock options. Until the shit hit the fan.

Sure most employees would prefer to work at home in their pijamas all day, save gas, avoid rush hour traffic, jerk off during lunch break, etc. But the fact is corporate management is not in favor of that because they know it is not the most productive situation. That’s why they are calling their employees back to the office now that Covid is over. You guys can whine about it all you want, but it isn’t going to change the fact that fully remote work is going to be the exception, not the norm, going forward.

[scaredyclassic]

[quote=Coronita][quote=spdrun]^^^ Kidding, or are you an outlier out of all tech workers?[/quote]

Scaredy is a lawyer, dude.[/quote]

I’m probably not cut out for tech. The thought of being alone with a computer and no people is scary.

Remote court appearances are sad too. Where would jim and Pam be if THE OFFICE had been remote? Jim would not have wed Pam, he wouldn’t have started athlead, wouldn’t have had all those friendships, wouldn’t have grown up…

Jim (final episode summation)
I sold paper at this company for twelve years. My job was to speak to clients on the phone about quantities and types of copier paper. Even if I didn’t love every minute of it, everything I have, I owe to this job. This stupid…wonderful…boring…amazing job.

I tend to agree with that. I wouldn’t be who I am without all the many workplaces I went through.

Although I did meet my wife at a random party 30 years ago in l.a. ….so I guess that wasn’t from work…

[spdrun]

^^^
I discovered that I was happier working in person during COVID … I went the other way from most people. I hear you.

[Coronita]

Covid did interesting thing to people. My kid was saying before COVID, there use to be a bunch of bratty kids at school, the “popular” ones that use to be very selective in who they would be caught dead talking with.

When school reopened and kids were allowed to go back, suddenly everyone is a lot nicer to each other. I guess a lot of the more social kids got a lesson of what it’s like to be left alone for a long time.

A lot of engineers are introverts so some actually do better working from home. Some communicate over slack way better than in person. Just like me, I suck at negotiating with a car dealer in person. I do everything over email or SMS.

But personally, I would prefer a hybrid model where I could go back to an office occasionally per week. I miss the company gym and foosball fridays.

But I don’t mind working from home because I can selectively tune out on the plethora of useless meetings we use to have. And actually, it’s better in some cases. There are some people that insist of holding meetings to talk about when to hold the next meetings because they lack any real skills beyond being a glorified secretary….but somehow they ended up in a “project management” role.

Just a quick check, 50 people in a meeting at roughly $100/hr per person for 1 hoursl costs the company $5000 for each of these useless meetings we use to have. Now, no one shows up for these anymore.

Also, at $6-7/gallon, not needing to go to work in person everyday is also good for the wallet and for the environment.

It also gives more flexibility to where people can live locally. For example, people can more readily live in Riverside county or Imperial County, even if their work location is in San Diego North county because in the worst case scenario, they don’t need to make a long commute to work everyday even in a hybrid mode.
They can buy better house at a better price than something near Sorrento Valley.

It also helps the company find people who is willing to do the lower paying hourly clerical jobs and helps those people keep more of their money by reducing commuting expense, which is a big part of their overall income. Someone further away can do these jobs remotely and not get eaten alive by long distance commute expenses everyday

[sdrealtor]

[quote=deadzone][quote=barnaby33]Deadzone you really do have an axe to grind. Wow, primadonnas? I don’t know about the rest of the tech industry but I am straight of back, white of tooth and above all modest.

I offered you a rebuttal and then you said it was irrelevant. You sir are veering off into incoherence. I may be wrong but I’ve been around in tech a long time. Salaries aren’t actually that high now. During the 90’s contract software engineers (more senior than me at the time but certainly less so than me now) could regularly find 100+/hr contracts. Those are few and far between these days. Plus the cost of living has what tripled? Salaries have really stagnated and compressed. Sure a college grad now gets 80k to start but trying to find jobs above 140k is still difficult. I think you think that everyone works at FAANG or that’s the impression I get.
Josh[/quote]

You tech guys have reading comprehension issues. I said the prima-donnas are the ones who threaten to quit if “forced” to work from the office a couple times a week. Think their skills are so unique, rare and irreplaceable that they can get any job they want. I see a lot of this attitude lately and it reminds me of the late 90s when engineers were hopping between multiple startups every few months chasing higher salary and stock options. Until the shit hit the fan.

Sure most employees would prefer to work at home in their pijamas all day, save gas, avoid rush hour traffic, jerk off during lunch break, etc. But the fact is corporate management is not in favor of that because they know it is not the most productive situation. That’s why they are calling their employees back to the office now that Covid is over. You guys can whine about it all you want, but it isn’t going to change the fact that fully remote work is going to be the exception, not the norm, going forward.[/quote]

Speaking of reading comprehension issues someone seems to be stuck on the idea that we need everyone working fully remote to continue the incredible growth around here. We do not! A small handful each month arriving has and will continue to change the housing market around here

[Author]

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