What changes when you work outside an office?
vinko.substack.com
vinko.substack.com
It doesn't take long before the high performers on those teams get sick of picking up the slack. The high performers move on to companies that care, while the team's output continues to decline as everyone pushes the boundaries of how little work they can get away with. Eventually management wonders why certain teams have so many people but so little output, "restructuring" occurs to trim the slackers, and the hiring cycle starts again to build the teams back up.
Performance management is more important than ever when leading remote teams.
The 30 year seniors were pretty good despite their ignorance of the world outside their company.
The newbies have something to prove.
And it takes about 10 years to have a recession... To cut the fat.
Is there any disadvantage to being a "forever newbie" at companies? I learn sooo much when I change jobs. I can't imagine 7 years in 1 position is good for your career outside a chance at management.
Personally, I love the idea of jumping around every 18 months or so to experience new domains, new technologies and learn from new people, but I also worry a lot that this will severely limit my career potential after I've done it for 10-15 years.
I'm 20+ years in and HATE changing jobs. The initial period where I'm Jon Snow (I know nothing) is always annoying and makes me feel like I'm not contributing at a level that supports my role and compensation. I find that it takes 3 months to start to understand conversations, 6 months to contribute to them, and 9-12 months to really be a consistent and effective leader of things.
And the difference is stark. While I could coast and still outperform everyone I now have so much to learn and the progress seems so slow. I'm slowly getting my hunger back and as someone who loves to learn I wonder when did I lose it?
Always being in situations where you're learning is a great idea. You should be able to find learning situations as you move up in your career.
Always being in situations where you're a total newbie/beginner is not so great. You should ideally be able to build upon previous experience in some way with each new job. The problem is that your performance will be evaluated relative to some baseline, and constantly being too far on the "total noob" side of that baseline will start to send the wrong impression as you get older.
That's not to say you shouldn't avoid opportunities where you'll need to learn a lot to begin, but you should be evaluating new opportunities with an eye toward career progression at each step. It's easy to hit the reset button multiple times when you're young, but people will have different expectations about baseline competency when you've had a decade of career experience under your belt.
Of course you risk tying yourself to a dead horse that will never go anywhere and now you need to start over from the below the rest: you have experience that nobody needs and none of the general experience everyone else wants for an okay position. Good luck recognizing when/where you need to be to get the good position in 10 years vs a dead end that they don't care about...
That's where a good compensation structure comes into play
On a more serious note, since no one is reviewing my code, I resorted to automated testing. It doesn't catch all the bugs, but at least it's something.
Sometimes I had 5 different projects at once though.
Very useful for me now that I WFH and not a coworking space.
Sometimes I'm stuck on a problem and I just need to get up and walk around and do something to clear my head. But, when I worked in the office I felt like I needed to always be seen either in a meeting or butt in chair. So I would often get stuck and just spin my wheels all day. Then I'd often figure out the solution in my head while walking to my car or driving home or sleeping on it. Now, working from home, I feel free to get up and walk around the block or go unload the dishwasher or whatever while my mind thinks about it. Again, the company gets much more useful work from me than they ever did when I worked in the office.
Yeah, norms. Like the expectation that employees remain signed into instant messaging apps. And the associated values where for example being signed in is construed as a sign of productivity.
I worked as a financial services company like that once where I maxed out my annual bonus and got the highest raises because I was on top of messaging. From messaging in the bathroom, from bars, and for two days a hospital bed.
I consider myself very lucky that my wife, also in IT at another large company, had the same work from home requirement and so although we have been a social island, we haven't been isolated because of each other's company. We share a spare bedroom, already equipped with comfortable tanker desks and large monitors, and as such had already superior workstations than those back at our corporate offices.
We do have timing collisions for stand up, retros, et cetera but in general it's less than 5% of the time so we just try to be quiet when the other is doing a demo.
For work-home balance, I would say the balance is largely lost, but that as an overall, the experience is still improved. I find it is much easier to work earlier, and later, hours, but to take larger spans of downtime during what was previously our core hours. So I might find myself writing code at 10pm, but because that tends to happen only when it is a good fit, it's still an improvement.
But 9 or 10 months is not enough time to really know that it's going to last long-term. If I allow the work-home imbalance to solidify, what longer term effects will I come to regret?
Yeah, you need some degree of discipline and that discipline may be to establish fairly fixed working hours. I do up to a point. On the other hand, I don't have any trouble running out to do errands for an hour on the one hand. And checking email or something else relatively quick in the evening on the other.
You say the balance is lost, but then go on to describe what I'd consider a great work-life balance.
There's never going to be complete equilibrium, but when work and life can both push and pull, then I'd describe that as balance.
Moving away from "this chunk of hours is for work" and "this chunk of hours is for not-work" to "hit a general target of X hours of work over the course of a week" but allowing that time to ebb and flow as work and life demand it seems much more balanced to me.
The experience with my current employer (fortune 500) has been all over the map:
First it was: "Stay home if you don't feel safe, otherwise, you should be at the office."
Then it was: "Yeah, we're going full WFH for a few months."
Then it was: "We going to start transitioning back to the office - we're going to have 2 week shifts. 2 weeks in the office, then 2 weeks out."
nobody showed up anyways, which apparently raised the ire of the executive teams since they were doing badge reports and they reports were really bad
Then it was: "Yeah, you know that 2 two week shift idea? Forget it, we need everybody back in the office, effective immediately."
This came down from the CEO. The middle management and executive teams were not cool with that idea, so they told their team members only come in if you want to, otherwise, stay at home - regardless of what the CEO says.
Right now, with this new surge, there hasn't been any new mandate(s) coming down. People are out of the office full time and nobody I've spoken to has any desire to go back into the office to work or wear a mask the entire time they're working.
The company recently sold two of their buildings to an out of state real estate company. I'm assuming it was a cost cutting decision since the company has about a dozen buildings they own in the city. I would think a lot of companies would start doing this as well. Having a huge overhead for real estate you're not using isn't good for the bottom line.
Look at what happened to Yahoo and Intel. After allowing very liberal work for home policies for decades, some people caught on and figured out how to slack off and milk the nice paycheck and benefits.
Then Intel and Yahoo cracked down.
... Wait.
Worth reading the full thread at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25187136
> I worked for Intel for a few years, 2005-2007. It's hard to put into words what happened to Intel...
It's not working from home, it's living at work.
One of the things that has happened is I've hardly played a computer game in months, because I'd do that at the same desk I work at, and it's easier to lock the computer than to unplug it to plug my personal equipment back in.
As fall progressed I started filling in some gaps in my outerwear and kept going. Now that the sun is down before I finish working, I'm anticipating some trouble.
For example, infinitely flexible work hours and asynchronous communication sounds like a dream come true to many people, especially introverted engineers. What could be better than doing whatever you want all day, then pulling some tickets out of the queue to work on in your spare time, at your leisure?
Unfortunately, reality is often quite different. Most engineering work doesn't operate like an assembly line with Jira tickets coming out of the Project Management conveyor belt and into the Engineering Department to be quietly transformed into features. This quickly becomes obvious after cumulative months of delays from ping ponging e-mails back and forth over the course of a week for something that could have been settled with a 1-hour video call. So now the work becomes a mix of flexible work hours punctuated by exhausting synchronous calls where everyone tries to compensate for working in different directions for the past few days.
Younger engineers often also struggle with time management. When we had infinitely flexible hours, it was common for younger engineers to trickle in work for the the first part of the week and then scramble to pull late nights into Thursday and Friday to make up for procrastinating all week. I jokingly called it the "college schedule" because we've all been there before. One of the unspoken benefits of fixed, core work hours is that it's more likely to help people avoid procrastination cycles. Obviously not a miracle cure, but it's a step above free-form schedules.
It can be hard to believe, but switching teams in this situation back to pre-determined core working hours can end up making everyone more happy. Few people will tell you that they want fixed working hours up front, but in my experience most people prefer it after trying it both ways. Teams can still be flexible for running errands, picking up kids from school, going to the gym, and so on. But having some core coordination hours will ease key communication issues.
The difficult part as a manager is that you're not going to be able to convince people that they'll actually be better off with 4-6 fixed, overlapping core hours for the team up front. It's one of those things you need to experience both ways before you truly understand it.
1. I can focus better at home vs at the office. 2. Remote work gives me an opportunity to change my scenery (travel or just go to the park) while working to help inspire me. 3. My day-to-day activities are more flexible as long as I'm delivering, which means I can cook healthy meals at home, take a mid-day run, or go walk my dog. 4. No commute, means I can sleep longer and greatly reduces my daily stress level.
Those are the upsides, but there's also downsides:
1. Much harder to build a rapport with people I work with, and I haven't developed any new adult friendships through work the way I did while I was in the office. There's no after-work crew who goes to dinner together or has game nights, like I did when I was in office. 2. Office politics is more difficult and more pointed, without the watercooler / hallway conversations, everything is a lot more pointed and direct and consequently also more difficult. You can't be as soft or subtle when you're remote, because everything necessitates a calendar invite and a video call. 3. I crave socialization outside of work more, while the opportunities to do so consequently dwindle. Traveling while working was a huge help, but COVID-19 killed that. Working actually from home means I'm starved for social interaction with other adults.
Then there's the things that are just a reality of the situation, but could be good or bad depending on the person:
1. I'm responsible for ensuring I get things done and how I spend my time during the day. 2. I'm responsible for making sure my equipment is up to snuff and capable of meeting the rigors of my work cycle. 3. I'm responsible for ensuring that I communicate my progress, needs, and achievements to my boss, peers, and others within the company proactively, because they have less visibility into those things directly otherwise. 4. I have to be a better self-advocate.
I've done some of my best work while remote, but it's all a matter of finding a way to "get into the groove", wherever I'm working. As long as you can stay motivated and focused, that's the environment you need to be working in whether it's at home, in an office, or in a coworking space.
I tried to counteract this with noise cancelling headphones and music of my own, but sometimes you just have to have quiet to hear your own thoughts.
The difference with having a completely quiet work environment is incredible.
Right now working from home is a bit different. For example, almost everyone I work with could also be working from home, so all of our meetings are online. That's a bit of a benefit. On the other hand, it's not possible to do most forms of in-real-life recreation right now (gyms/food/movies/social gatherings) because it's not safe. So stuff gets more stressful and boring than it would normally be.