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Comment by ironic_ali | Hacker News Reader

Didn't Yahoo's Mayer ban working from home?

So, when she says burnout comes from not being able to do the things you love, like spending extra time with your family by working from home - seems somewhat hypocritical..

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Fuck what Yahoo are doing, they're dead in the water.

What annoys me more about modern workplace culture is the inflexibility that companies adopt on almost any every facet of employee work life. A little flexibility around how employees go about performing their work could make a huge impact on their employee's quality of life. Large companies are particularly problematic. For example:

* No working from home, period. Despite technology and comms being so advanced now most jobs could probably be performed from the moon.

* 20 holiday days per annum and no negotiation around how one might earn, purchase or simply request additional time off in the form of unpaid leave

* No flexitime - in at 9am, out at 5pm...hour for lunch, that's your lot. Sucks to be you, enjoy being stuck in rush hour traffic twice a day

* More often than I hoped would be the case in 2017, many companies enforce a strict dress code even for people working behind the scenes. Some of the biggest morons I've had to work with have been devout wearers of the suit and tie (or female equivalent)

You get the idea.

+1 internets for you. I wrote about my experience extensively in this thread. Didn't make any reference to these specifically but they pretty well hold true and existed where I last worked. Not so compelling for modern developers.

Your last point made me laugh. I worked in a call center with a dress code, including forbidding certain types of footwear (no open toes or heals. Safety around the office chairs, after all). It always struck me as ridiculous, since not only could customers not see us, but for security reasons, we couldn't give out our location (inbound collections for a phone company).

They tried to say it made us act more professional, and I always viewed it as another method of control.

The rest of your points is my basic attitude as well.

If it's in at 9am, out at 5pm that's great... my experience was more like: you have to be in at 9am at the latest, but almost every day you get stuck until 7-8pm or more. And if you're late 15 minutes in the morning it's a huge deal, but staying 2-3 hours longer is just fine, even recommended if you wish to get good assessments. And they honestly couldn't understand why all senior engineers are leaving them after a year or so.

But how do you plan to be productive if you miss the daily scrum?

Same experience here.

Document first (remote first) workflow.

I think I've /wanted/ it but have never experienced it because this is how I want all meetings to go:

  * Someone makes a list of the points to discuss and the initial background on them.

  * Everyone else contributes to clarifying the points and data, as well as possible reactions/conclusions.

  * At some point the data is summarized and whoever does make the decisions does so.

  * That feeds in to the next 'meeting'.

All of this, of course, happens without ACTUALLY having a meeting; it's just scheduling sync points to have contributes (if you are contributing) in before the deadlines.

My comment was actually sarcasm, but it's worth discussing. What you describe is one way that an ideal process can work, but actually make things worse when put into practice by people whose job it is to meetings. You want to batch them and optimize, but what I've seen managers do is take these principles and increase the amount of meetings. If there's time to spare because of less meetings, you might as well book a meeting to plan ahead.

Of course it's worth noting that in a "remote-first"—a term I love and a principle I can get behind—environment, these people wouldn't have anything to do.

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