Hacker News Reader

Comment by eachro | Hacker News Reader

What is her team responsible for?

They analyze field reports from other scientists. 100% of her work is done at her PC.

When she’s at the office she has to deal with her lower morale in addition to the random coworker stopping by to chat or her manager interrupting her in various ways.

During her WFH time, she alway completed her work by 10am each morning. Now she struggles to complete it by 5pm while being in the office.

The folks that left had many years to go until they were vested. Since she only has a short time remaining, she decided to stick it out.

I've heard similar reports. I've also directly suffered very malignant management in the past before covid. We're talking people who were outright awful to the business and some who were ultimately fired.

There needs to be better management of management.

On the flip side there is nothing about an office that should turn ~1 hour of work into a day.

The interruptions absolutely do add up. My suspicion too is office bound work probably suffers from work being added on amounting to whole other jobs. Every job I’ve had as a professional has been essentially multiple jobs not reflected in the pay nor job description.

Don't buy it. Yes, interruptions add up. They don't add up to 7 hours a day. I mean look at your story. Your wife's team quit and the office is empty. There's hardly anyone there to interrupt her.

Someone going from a 8 hour workday in the office to a 1 hour workday at home is sandbagging it. There's no two ways around it. Let them WFH and off come the sandbags because they can get that time back. Put them back in the office and the sandbags come back because there's no incentive for them to work any faster. They're stuck in the office for 8 hours no matter how much work they do.

I believe you meant to reply to me. They’re over over 100 individuals on her floor alone. Just her and one other on her team. The engineers and field team still come into the office.

She starts work at 7am. Normal hours are 7 to 4 but lately she’s been staying until 5pm to try to catch up.

During WFH, she logged in at 7am and was usually done by 10am.

I guess I’m going to have to start spelling everything out and including every single detail because some of you like to assume whatever you must in order to fit your narrative.

> I guess I’m going to have to start spelling everything out and including every single detail because some of you like to assume whatever you must in order to fit your narrative.

That's the unfortunately thing with some folks' responses. They question every interpretation. As to why they exceed the bounds of reasonable discussion and make everything a dissection because they are missing some key detail they have trouble clarifying seems to be besides the point.

I appreciated your story, and have seen similar experiences.

I’m beginning to learn. I believe I offended someone when I included the term “conservative” when describing my wife’s director.

I suppose that is unavoidable these days.

Ironic, isn't it, that stereotypes can be so darn useful (marketing folks call them personas) yet so universally reviled?

So she's gone from 3 hours to ~9. That doesn't really change anything about my point. If you're having 6 hours of your day wasted by people not on your team that's on you and not the office.

6 hours of running downstairs and showing the lab manager how to use the autoclave again, 6 hours of answering older coworkers questions about excel, 6 hours of her boss walking into her office and saying “hey, did you see what they said on Fox News last night?”, six hours of chasing crackheads out of the parking lot while they drive to break into her car, six hours of searching for who stole her lunch or almond milk. It all adds up.

But if it makes you feel better to place the blame on her, please go right ahead.

Context switching has a cost. HUGE cost. It takes me over an hour to get “in to the zone” when interrupted from deep work. Emphasis on deep work, Im not talking about writing emails (although that can fall in this category too, not going to judge other professions). It’d take about three interruptions to ruin an entire workdays worth of productivity for me, which is very easy to do in an office environment. I paid a steep price all those years in an office, never again.

It's clearly on the office environment. You've been provided an A/B example where workload is roughly equivalent pre and post period but time to complete has extended.

Many other people have shared similar observations.

Is it a bandwagon to hop on? Perhaps. But better than making the OP subject of dissection and study without an IRB approval or defined survey methodology.

You mentioned that since WFH ended, the team shrunk due to resignations from 8 to 2. Is the total team workload similar to before?

If so she's doing what 4 people were doing before and that explains most of the increased time to complete work. A few office interruptions and a tiring commute will easily push that past 5pm. I hope it doesn't get worse for her before the vesting.

Yes the workload is the same plus she’s the lifeline of her entire floor and then some.

If anyone has a technical question they go to her. If the lab manager has a question about equipment, they go to my wife.

Job description sounds like something that can be easily automated or at least outsourced to $3/hour country.

She’s a microbiologist so it’s a bit more complex than that, but yes the work is fairly simple once you setup your systems to make it efficient.

Please don't ask them to dox their wife.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com