Yes |
69/62% |
No |
43/38% |
112 total votes |
|
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Replies are listed 'Best First'. | |
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Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by davido (Cardinal) on May 02, 2022 at 14:42 UTC | |
Remote isn't for everyone. For me, I love it. There are cons, of course: Dave | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by Tux (Canon) on May 02, 2022 at 10:47 UTC | |
YES! Occasional office-visits are - to me - more than enough. Enjoy, Have FUN! H.Merijn | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on May 02, 2022 at 11:17 UTC | |
No. Having long suffered an unhappy home life, I've relished escaping that misery by heading in to the office. Perhaps egged on by Google, I also noticed a huge improvement in office conditions in high-end companies over the past 20 years or so: superb desks, ergonomic chairs, powerful computers with multiple large screens, well-stocked kitchens cleaned daily, fantastic coffee machines (some companies even providing chefs and baristas), ping pong tables, the list goes on and on. I was also lucky to have some fantastic and entertaining workmates, close friends, almost like family. So the Covid lockdowns hit me really hard. Though the new on-line meetings were fun, I missed the daily office banter and especially the enjoyable physical activities that kept me fit, such as ping pong matches and going on walks together at lunchtime. | [reply] |
by dbuckhal (Chaplain) on May 03, 2022 at 02:40 UTC | |
No. Having long suffered an unhappy home life, I've relished escaping that misery by heading in to the office. Perhaps egged on by Google, I also noticed a huge improvement in office conditions in high-end companies over the past 20 years or so: superb desks, ergonomic chairs, powerful computers with multiple large screens, well-stocked kitchens cleaned daily, fantastic coffee machines (some companies even providing chefs and baristas), ping pong tables, the list goes on and on. I was also lucky to have some fantastic and entertaining workmates, close friends, almost like family. pretty much what he said. well, close enough to copy/paste... I miss my long lunch walks and long 20-30 mile cycling commutes, one way, twice a week for additional fitness... but i stink at ping pong. | [reply] |
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on May 03, 2022 at 07:22 UTC | |
I miss my long lunch walks and long 20-30 mile cycling commutes, one way, twice a week for additional fitness... Impressive level of fitness.
but i stink at ping pong I don't. ;-) As an indoor sport, ping pong took a massive Covid hit. I still miss the fun ping pong battles in the office. I also miss attending in-person Meetup events ... as mentioned here (in the last paragraph), Covid put a crimp on those who avoided cooking, cleaning and shopping simply by wolfing down the free food on offer at a different geek Meetup group every night of the week. :) Update: When the Covid lockdowns hit my workplace, I noticed that single people, especially those who lived alone, were generally lonely and miserable ... while family folks, especially those with nice homes in leafy suburbs with long commutes to the office, were generally ecstatic. | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by syphilis (Archbishop) on May 01, 2022 at 13:40 UTC | |
I prefer to not work at all. | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by RMGir (Prior) on May 01, 2022 at 16:54 UTC | |
I do miss the in-person interactions occasionally, but I could get my "fix" of that with a day a week or so :) Mike | [reply] |
by Bod (Parson) on May 01, 2022 at 19:33 UTC | |
I do miss the in-person interactions occasionally As a business owner with a small, fully remote team, this is a major challenge. It becomes greater for junior staff and because we are a very small company in terms of headcount. Most of my current team are all based in the same country (the UK) and geographically close so we can meet up for a meal or other social activity a few times each year. But one of the reasons for building a remote team before the Pesky Pandemic is the ability to attract talent from anywhere globally. I have a simple rule - everyone can work when and where they want subject to a few restrictions. In accessing those restrictions I ensure they are as few as possible. MS Teams is our office and I expect everyone to appear there at least three times each day unless they are on leave or have otherwise explained they won't be. We have a few channels (such as our virtual coffee machine) within Teams which are there to deal with some of the issues with not getting personal interactions - using them is not optional! It takes some people a while to realise that it's OK to keep a voice-call going for a few hours with very little being said. Breaking the habit of putting the phone down at the end of a conversation can be hard. But for all the difficulties, I would not have my team any other way. Looking back I cannot believe that 15 years ago I spend an hour sitting in the car most mornings before I got to work. No way would I go back to that and I would not expect any of my team to either. | [reply] |
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on May 03, 2022 at 04:46 UTC | |
Looking back I cannot believe that 15 years ago I spend an hour sitting in the car most mornings before I got to work. No way would I go back to that... Yes, I agree that driving to work really sucks (especially through working class neighbourhoods ;-). In my younger days, I'd get the job first, then rent nearby, close enough to walk to work. Looking back I cannot believe that I used to routinely stay up gallivanting till 3:00 am ... then drag myself out of bed at 9:50 to arrive in the office puffing at 10:00 am ... while an older family man, residing in the scenic (not working class) Blue Mountains, diligently arose at 5:30 am for his two-hour train journey to arrive in the office two hours before me! By the time I arrived, he'd done four hours work because he got a lot done sitting in a comfortable regional train with his headphones and laptop. We both found it hilarious. As you might expect, he was also the first to leave in the afternoon, so he could get home in time to spend some quality time with his young children. | [reply] |
by Bod (Parson) on May 07, 2022 at 17:26 UTC | |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by hv (Prior) on May 01, 2022 at 22:46 UTC | |
No, over the last 20 years of my career I found easily the most rewarding part of it was teaching and mentoring; I am not so skilled as to be able to do that remotely. Home has always been far and away the best place to get code written. But I never felt that the breadth of my job should be restricted by the contract: I've always looked for opportunities to add value in other ways, and often found those opportunities as enjoyable as writing code or more so. For those jobs where I worked 100% from home (usually at my own insistence) I rarely found such opportunities, and over the longer term my job satisfaction suffered for it. Hugo | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by Discipulus (Canon) on May 01, 2022 at 18:51 UTC | |
pandemic demonstrated we can work from home without any significant impact on productivity or perhaps even with some increment of it. It mainly depends on the ability of manager to follow our work and this is a problem in Eataly: generally good workers, mediocre mid level and terrible managers. More: at $work recently decided to move into a mega open space building with ~100 people per floor when in the rest of western countries they finally discovered open spaces are counter productive: to concentrate on my job I had (the few days I'm at office) to wear my headset with high level music to clear the loud of coworkers. Currently I have only one coworker of my same team working in Rome so it doesent change a lot were I am. Companies with bit more salt in the head can rearrange themselves to save a lot of money with a diffuse remote work policy. My home station is better, I made it with some decent wood, coffe is by far better, my little balcony is just here, when is hot I can dress the way I like. If you ear about a full remote, partime, perl job I'm here :) L*
There are no rules, there are no thumbs.. Reinvent the wheel, then learn The Wheel; may be one day you reinvent one of THE WHEELS. | [reply] [d/l] |
by Bod (Parson) on May 01, 2022 at 19:35 UTC | |
pandemic demonstrated we can work from home without any significant impact on productivity... I was building a fully remote team long before the pandemic! | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by gloryhack (Deacon) on May 02, 2022 at 09:39 UTC | |
This is not to suggest that I know what I'm talking about. It's just what has always worked for me. | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by duelafn (Parson) on May 02, 2022 at 14:20 UTC | |
Strongly prefer a mix (so voted No). I go in 2-3 days a week and I use remote days for long tasks requiring focus and days in the office for shorter tasks or tasks requiring collaboration (and since I'm an industrial automation developer, I also need those days to run tests on the actual machine hardware). The mixture also provides a significant social benefit. When I'm physically at work, I consider myself interruptable so will be more pleasant with people and more focused on useful collaboration - since I don't have any expectations of accomplishing anything large anyway. Conversely, I don't do meetings and will be much less responsive on remote days - those are the days I'm productive in code generation. Good Day, | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by stevieb (Canon) on May 01, 2022 at 15:22 UTC | |
100% yes. At a job that provides vast flexibility. This allows me to travel and do whatever I want, whenever I want and wherever I want so long as there's either a cell signal or Internet connectivity of some sort. I've worked remotely for almost six years now, and I love it. | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by afoken (Chancellor) on May 04, 2022 at 05:46 UTC | |
Yes and no. A little meditation: Fom day 1 in my first job, I promised myself not to take any work home. Simply because I know it would be addictive. I would return home late, work on a problem through the night, and have only a little bit of sleep. And that would not happen once or twice, but more or less every day. And I did not take work home for about two decades. There were little exceptions. When I set up OpenVPN at work so that my boss could work from home, I also set up a VPN account for me. For testing, and for those days when the early birds at work ran into trouble while I was still busy preparing breakfast. Those little things like "oops, I deleted $IMPORTANTFILE, could you please restore it from the backup?" But generally, I did not take work home. I need about an hour to drive home, that's plenty time to think about unsolved problems. It's my little kind of meditation. More than once, I found a solution or at least I had an idea how to solve a pending problem while driving home. In that case, I simply stopped, wrote down some notes, and started thinking about really important problems like what to cook for the week-end. Then, COVID-19 happened. Our gouvernment made it mandatory to offer home office to anybody remotely able to work from home. Nobody was forced, but it was highly recommended. So my boss asked me "can we do it?" Of course, OpenVPN works fine, I just needed to create some more accounts, and after about an hour, the whole company except for the cleaning lady had VPN accounts and could work from home. It worked surprisingly well. Our regular weekly meeting was changed to an online conference system, our PBX already supported virtual conference rooms, and only occasionally, a few people worked in the office to test the integration of hard- and software we developed. I started to like working from home. Five seconds for the way from breakfast to office are hard to beat, and distractions are really low compared to the office. It was great for the problem I was working on. It was an isolated problem with very few external dependencies. A blackbox being fed with some measurement data and returning some useful results had to be ported from a mess of Excel VBA to C# (see [OT] Finding similar program code). Working eight hours with messy VBA is also a good way to prevent working a single second more that eight hours. ;-) I missed the meditative hour driving back home to calm down and get the stuff out of my head. And after that problem was done, other problems appeared that needed more communication. Phone calls can do a lot, but just walking over to the next office does more. Also, our offices are open. We close the doors only if we really need an undisturbed hour. That means some distraction, but you also hear what happens, and where problems pop up. A simple example: Solving hardware problems is not my job, but hearing one of the hardware experts getting mad about transistors releasing magic smoke, again and again, despite the simulation working properly is a reason to walk over to the hardware lab. Just listening what he tries to archive, and having a look at the circuit diagram. In that case, the simulation was perfectly happy with a reverse base-emitter voltage of about -24 V. Datasheet and silicon agreed that magic smoke would be released at about -7 V. Adding a simple zener diode solved the issue. That would never have happened working from home offices. Sure, he would have found the solution all by himself, but he might have killed a few more transistors along the way. Rubber duck debugging for hardware. The mandatory home office offer is now history, we have now largely returned to the office, but switching to home office has become something usual. Instead of wasting a vacation day for thinks like a craftsman fixing something at home, or an unexpededly closed kindergarden, you simply switch to home office. All you have to do is to mark that day as home office in our public calendar at least one day ago, no questions asked. I still like to work from home if the problem at hand can be solved in isolation. I don't carry 100 kg of hardware and test equipment back home to debug the software running on the hardware. A single PCB and some adapters is a different story ... Alexander
-- Today I will gladly share my knowledge and experience, for there are no sweeter words than "I told you so". ;-) | [reply] |
by Bod (Parson) on May 07, 2022 at 17:51 UTC | |
I missed the meditative hour driving back home to calm down and get the stuff out of my head My business coach made much the same observation right at the start of the Pesky Pandemic. He is a very smart cookie but he hadn't realised this subtle side effect of remote working. It is normal for him to have back-to-back meetings all day long separated only by a car journey between them. Come remote working and that buffer time disappeared. With it, so did his time to reflect on the meeting he had left and mentally recharge a bit before the next meeting. Had he not recognised this early and taken some corrective action, I am pretty sure he would have become seriously ill. | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by marto (Cardinal) on May 01, 2022 at 13:34 UTC | |
Yes! | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by ajt (Prior) on May 07, 2022 at 09:25 UTC | |
Depends... For years I worked in an open-plan office. I found it highly distracting and annoying. I honestly hated the space. However it was useful if you needed to talk to someone, and except for winter, my cycle to and from the office was nice. Since changing job I now work from home almost all the time. I miss seeing people and my cycle to work, but I don't have the annoying distractions of an office, my desk space at home is better and I don't have the winter commute to deal with. On balance I think going into an office once or twice a fortnight may be useful, especially if other people were in the office on the same day. Otherwise going to an office when my colleagues aren't in it would be an utter waste of time. | [reply] |
by eyepopslikeamosquito (Archbishop) on May 07, 2022 at 22:38 UTC | |
> For years I worked in an open-plan office. I found it highly distracting and annoying. I honestly hated the space. Yes, I also hate sterile open-plan office space! Some related office space insights from renowned architect Christopher Alexander (who sadly passed away recently):
I've worked in many different office environments over the years. My favourite was perhaps my first job in a sprawling lab environment in old converted cottages, with typically two people per office. It's the only place I've worked where you could actually open the window! Update: See also: Open-Plan Offices are now the Dumbest Management Fad of All Time | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by talexb (Chancellor) on Jun 03, 2022 at 21:30 UTC | |
Yup. Instead of racing out of the house to catch the bus/train (45 minutes each way), I save 90 minutes a day. I can run errands during the day; I can eat lunch at home; and if I'm beat, no need to look for the company nap room -- just go to bed for half an hour. It's great! And I've heard some companies saying, "OK, we're going back to the office on THIS DAY", then when they see a flood of resignations, they're puzzled. Face it: the pandemic has fundamentally changed things. We have to all accept the new reality. | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by Don Coyote (Hermit) on May 09, 2022 at 15:07 UTC | |
While viewing may be done remotely, you must always do work locally, alas! | [reply] |
Re: Do you prefer to work remotely?
by Anonymous Monk on Jun 01, 2022 at 08:46 UTC | |
| [reply] |