Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomanydoubts | Hacker News Reader

Going to an office to write software is absolutely insane. I like going on fridays and leaving early to drink beer with coworkers.

View on HN

You describe my ideal hybrid schedule. I don’t miss being in the office Monday through Thursday at all, but I really miss Fridays in the office.

In my experience, remote work typically has no direct productivity downsides, but team cohesion absolutely can take a hit. I find being in the same room with someone doesn’t help us work any better, but having been in the same room with them at some point (ideally not all that long ago) absolutely does, likely even more so having had a beer with them.

> In my experience, remote work typically has no direct productivity downsides, but team cohesion absolutely can take a hit

I'm sure this varies based on the type of work you're doing, but I found the hit to team cohesion led to long term productivity losses. At first we were getting more done than ever. As time went on our raw work output day-to-day did not decrease but a lot of unneeded work that previously would have been headed off at planning and discussion stages would get through.

This was on a team that is specifically doing speculative high risk/reward work so that might be applicable to a lot fewer people than I imagine.

> the hit to team cohesion led to long term productivity losses

It obviously ought to, right, or else why does (should) anyone care about team cohesion in the first place?

Keeping your people happy does not only impact your productivity, but it also impacts motivation (people who love their job are more likely to try and improve beyond their job), the overall churn and, as a second-order effect, even stuff like hiring or wages.

Of course, in the end this all affects the company productivity, but it's really not as straight-forward [0] as the productivity of a single team.

[0] "straight forward" is a bit of an overstatement for measuring team productivity, but that's a different discussion.

The absolute absurdity of sitting in an open office, and pretending to program the full 9-5. That's just not how work like this happens. Why do companies pay their developers high salaries, but then tie one hand behind their backs like that.

For me? Never again.

Why are you pretending to program the full 9-5?

I like the office and am currently working in the office but I just... get up and leave whenever I want. Come back whenever I want. No need to pretend to work 9-5.

Here's a story that explains this concept. A programmer goes to his manager, presenting a paper with a lengthy problem for the manager to solve. The manager looks over the paper, thinks for a few minutes, then writes down the answer. The employee then tells the manager "What were you doing for the last 5 minutes? It didn't look like you were working at all". The manager responds saying "I was thinking about the problem before coming up with the solution".

The programmer then informs the manager that this is what it is like to write code all day. But since programming looks like you are just sitting there not doing anything for much of the time, then you have to pretend to be doing something whenever someone walks by so it doesn't look like you are just goofing off (otherwise they feel that they can interrupt you breaking your train of thought). And that makes programming less efficient.

The manager was then enlightened.

every manager worth their salt climbs from being an engineer, so they should already know this

I'm a software manager and this isn't what happens in practice at all. The more comfortable they are, the sloppier and lazy their resulting code as they feel no pressure to take their work seriously. I can, and will, stand behind devs for hours to keep them determined and on-task.

Surely this post is parody, right?

I think maybe this is some kind of local optimum, but a poor one. Like if your devs already don't give two shits about anything, pressure from you watching over them might improve things somewhat.

But like the real fix is a path to a much better optimum, which is giving employees autonomy, trusting them, rewarding them adequately, getting them to actually care, so that they don't need to be watched over as individual code monkeys.

No. I'm the manager, they're the dev. If they want autonomy, become an artist.

Small wiener energy.

Do you want to feel powerful or to have productive devs?

I'm not a psychic, but I sense your software manager career is not going very far.

I seriously hope this is sarcasm. The best devs I know are the ones that goof off the most, because they're the ones that know they're good at what they do. The crappy devs are the ones who sit quietly at their desks all day and pretend to get work done. I think you should seriously reconsider your management style.

It's sarcasm

This is exactly what I've seen and experienced. The best devs that are goofing off, are the bedrock of a great work environment.

At least in my case, praise has often been given out based on time of work rather than work.

I am a hard worker because I send 2AM emails (which I may have scheduled in advance to give that impression).

Does "praise" mean "cash" or "promotion" (and if so, does "promotion" mean "more cash")? If not, why would you care about praise?

Benefit of the doubt if something takes longer than I estimate or if I decide to casually take an afternoon off to go talk to my aunt.

Is that not table stakes for any software engineering job?

That's pretty cool you work for a company with a culture that makes that possible. You're probably in the minority when it comes to office workers, though.

> Why are you pretending to program the full 9-5?

I'm not, because I now work from home. Where people value my actual work output, and not the hours I'm sitting in a chair, where my manager can see me.

This 100%. People are acting like someone is chaining them to their desk. Seriously, just get up! No one is going to say shit, you have all the power in this current market. I'm a huge fan of 2hr lunches that include a nap in the park. Get my best ideas walking to/from the park.

This can be quite true. I have gone weeks barely checking email and nobody said anything. Nobody even noticed.

My experience is almost exactly contrary.

At home, I get a "guilty" feeling if I don't work 100% effectively for the whole day. At the office, I never felt pressured to "code" the full eight hours, as I could see nobody was doing so (in Slack it seems everyone else is always green/present.)

At the office, I'd fill the day with conversations, lunch and coffee breaks, and other meaningful interactions with other programmers, managers, designers and various other stakeholders.

At home, when I need to take a mental break I just get bored and start procrastinating with the computer. If I go see my family to the other room we talk family business.

I look forward to returning to the office. Immense amounts of information just never get communicated over Slack & Zoom. I feel like working in a dark tunnel for the past 2 years and going.

If I wanted to sharply focus on a specific task for the whole eight hours I could do unlimited remote already pre-Covid. I used this option rarely, as these days could get quite exhausting.

I guess this is a good example of different people's work styles, and why it's probably important to give people the flexibility of choosing. I don't feel that type of pressure when WFH, but do when I'm in an office.

When WFH I'll often just check out for multiple hours in the middle of the day. Go on a walk, take a nap, whatever... Sometimes I'll just do more hours later that night to make up for it, or sometimes I'm just on top of everything anyway, and the break helps keep my mind fresh.

I never felt like I had the ability to do things like that when in the office

Indeed. Unlimited remote option with no pressure to attend the office works the best for everyone. We had this already pre-Covid due to being a distributed team between two cities.

This is true, with exception of Japanese people programming the full 7am - 10pm and pretending not working.

But why go 9-5? Show up at 10. Take a 2hr lunch at noon, and leave at 4. Ride your bike in, chill with people you like, get some work done, don't stress yourself. Ride your bike home and crack a beer. No one is chaining you to a desk, if you're a software engineer the cards are all in your hand in this market.

Agree. I go in once a week to pick up a shared lunch for everybody and we hang out and play some board games

Hanging out with coworkers would be my own personal hell, to be frank. And there's nothing wrong with my coworkers, I'd like to emphasize that, but I have friends and family that I'd rather hang out with. Coworkers are just coworkers to me.

I'm confused, what makes it hell if nothing's wrong with them?

Spending time socializing with people that aren't part of my social life by my own (direct) choosing feels like a chore to me, I suppose. A work party, to me, does not resemble actual work in many ways… and yet it does not resemble a party either. I would certainly enjoy to play volleyball on the beach with friends and family but would rather avoid it as a reward or team-building activity.

Last Friday I went in and got a good education on some of our physical hardware. This knowledge is only held by people that have been with the company since Spring 2020 or work in that department.

I can only imagine the amount of institutional knowledge that is being lost right now. Workers that are low to the ground and sociable who form informal bonds between departments are hurt by being limited to only online interactions, and as a result, the organization suffers too.

> Going to an office to write software is absolutely insane.

Why?

Writing software, especially in a large organization, is often an inherently social job, just like many others. You often need heads down time to actually get into flow and produce code, but that doesn't mean interaction with others isn't a significant part of it as well.

Linux kernel team seems to manage fine. Or maybe they'd all do better if they were in a big open office with Linus Torvalds.

Managing fine is different than it being insane to go into an office. And I don't know on what basis we can conclude that it wouldn't be better if core Linux devs were working together.

I don't know much about the nitty gritty of what kernel deving looks like, but it's possible that the work there looks more like longer stretches of heads down time than average. E.g., I can imagine you could be pretty impactful being heads down for weeks or months at a time micro-optimizing the performance of various components. I think this tends not to be true of most software.

One thing I do know about the social dynamics of Linux development is that Linus can be an asshole and flame at people a lot. You could worry that this would be more intense and thus worse in an office, but IME this kind of stuff tends to get better once people can see each other as actual humans and not just text on a screen.

I think the overwhelming majority of software that's written does not need that much attention.

What do you mean by attention?

I mean that e.g., software in large organizations often needs to fit in with the rest of the software the organization is writing, and that producing code is only part of the work; there's also working with others to find out what the right code to produce is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com