Anecdote, at one of the affected companies and we’ve been wfh. I honestly think my productivity has tanked. That’s the general sentiment for other folks that I’ve talked to, too
Many employees are new to remote work, and are now distracted by the virus, changes in the workplace, etc. This leads to bottlenecks for anyone relying on upstream work, and there's a chain reaction. I'm waiting a lot longer for work correspondence and code reviews.
It's reasonable to be distracted right now -- doesn't seem too bad yet, but it's impossible to work at capacity with these factors.
And that's in a hard-charging company like Google. Other companies are worse: ~13 years ago I worked at Microsoft and we had a period where the team just didn't do any work at all, for like 2 months. Everyone still showed up and pretended to be busy AF, but nothing got done. Lots of meetings and watercooler conversations got done though. Lots of status reporting as well. By any traditional metric people appeared to be "productive". But nothing got done all the same.
If you're so disinterested in your work, you'll find a million ways to goof off in the office also. Just because you're there doesn't mean you'll be productive.
I've been WFH/cafés for the last six years. I have occasional off days but I'm way more productive at home over the long run, than at the office. At the office I often find that I seem to have had a full day but can't actually identify concrete outcomes. It was just a long series of meetings, chitchats, catch-ups, interruptions, and so on.
Whether it's amazing or terrible depends on execution (and obviously other things), and transitioning in a week makes it even harder. Lean on someone experienced.
People have been making coffee like this for centuries and continue to do so without a problem. It's a no-cost fixable situation you're in.
A symbiosis, if only temporary between the corporation and the employee.
Cue David Attenborough's voiceover.
I always work from home and I can see where his issues come from. I'm sure he'd do things differently if this were a permanent state for him.
Or perhaps he will finally be able to break the habit. Without coffee many (not all) are sleeping better and more rested. He may discover he is one of those people.
Switch coffee with donut. Or newspaper and it starts sounding like traveling an extra hour in doesn't make as much sense as biking/roller blading/walking or driving 5 minutes to grab that coffee.
But when people are worried about flu-like symptoms like headaches, fatigue, muscle aches and being out of breath might not be the optimal time :)
No but seriously, instant coffee ftw. There are coffee snobs and then there's getting the job done.
Productivity is ultimately going to be determined by how people actually behave, not how we believe they should behave. Not even by how they believe they should behave.
Really, he is giving up the benefits of specialization, which has uplifted mankind since the dawn of time.
(pod coffee with all its faults seems to be popular)
But in fairness for calling him out you have the most entitled statement ever read (until this message where I feel so entitled I call you out for calling him out)
https://twitter.com/MikeIsaac/status/1237577750480740353?s=1...
But then again, it is sad that these days, mockery is the default way of discourse on the internet.
On the bright side, maybe it will do some good overall, because working from home is (IMO) clearly a good idea at the moment, and now people have a strawman villain they can fight against by supporting WFH policies.
You're being mocked because you're musing over the lack of luxury office amenities that many, many workers in the U.S. don't have.
And the fact your comment about needing to walk to Starbucks and actually do the dishes make you sound like a manchild.
People just hate tech workers and are looking for every reason to represent them as being entitled and out of touch.
But for me the problem is less anything you are doing, and more the implications of what you've said about Google (and other companies for that matter). The fact that employers are trying to remove so much of the "friction" of normal, human life to maximize time spent working is a bit dystopic. I mean, by the same logic, why not scrap the cafeteria and bathrooms for that matter, hook employees up to feeding tubes and catheters, so they literally never leave their desks?
Cooking, eating, meal cleanup, etc are a part of human life. If we are trying to streamline that, it should be for the extra comfort of the individual, not so that a company can keep them at the grindstone for even longer. So the argument that working from home causes decreases in productivity because employees have to care for themselves isn't actually an indictment against working from home, it's an indictment against the expectations of productivity that employers have.
Seriously, though, I hear you both for what you were actually doing (not really whining) and for how you are taking it. I personally have never been able to just let things roll off me,either (or, better yet, turn them into humor).
You have to admit, despite being the butt of the joke, it's pretty funny.
This is just part of being an adult. You can manage! You can get used to anything.
And is your work actually closer than Starbucks? I don't understand that one.
Let's hear your cooking tips, then. Preferrably no "microwave the plastic box contents you got from the grocery store", that doesn't count as real food, for nutrients quality nor taste.
Vegetables/fruit take a minute or two to chop and pan-fry / prep as you like.
Protein can be as simple as a poached chicken breast, roasts again just stick them in an oven. Beans in a pressure cooker, that's also pretty automatic too.
Cooking's as time-consuming as you make it.
And then these can be batched-up / prepped as a morning chore; I find it takes less time than cleaning the house. I don't batch as I like the break in the day of another activity. It's less time than a commute.
YouTube is packed full of easy, tasty recipes if looking for somewhere to start.
I've been using the newbie friendly NYT no knead bread[1] for years, and it's that easy. The only gotcha is that you have to prepare it the night before, but that isn't really a big deal in practice. Bread is surprisingly difficult to ruin, and fresh daily bread has been a huge boon for me in these new WFH times.
I highly recommend it.
[1] https://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/11376-no-knead-bread
Shred lettuce, slice avocado and serve with some chunky bread rolls. Shouldn't take more than 5 minutes, 1 bowl and a plate.
Cook for 3 minutes and you have a delicious noodle soup. Add chicken or protein for extra fun.
Hoping I can expense the tp at least.
Unblock yourself maybe? Pitch to your management that your productivity is bad and get them to either: a) let you bring hardware home, or b) expense your monitors for WFH.
So sorry about the dishes, but perhaps your dish washing efficiency will improve? If it's directly impactful to your productivity now for a single individual's daily calories it suggests you've got a lot to learn here! Perhaps a G2G course once normal business returns?
In terms of the monitor I can't help you, my most productive years were on an 11" MacBook air with a single tmux session. A 13" laptop sounds heavy.
(Disclaimer: I work at Google)
Is google not giving its employees monitors during this time? I find that surprising but also you could just go to Best Buy.
It's funnier because this is the NYC office and no one drives, so he was probably lugging it all the way through the subway system.
How is this even an argument??
Incidentally I do already have a monitor at home, that costs more than $500. And I'm not using it for WFH, because I find my 15" work laptop sufficient.
(b) If you're really unable or unwilling to cook or do the dishes, food delivery services are still running and the restaurants they deliver from will be happy to have your order. Order hot food and re-heat it on arrival if you're worried about getting infected from your food. Or maybe look at once of the box-meal delivery services, you still need to cook, but most of the prep work is done.
(c) buy a cheap monitor for now and sell or donate it after you go back to work. You can get a refurb 22" monitor for $50 or so which must be better than a 13" laptop display.
More like $30 for a coffee machine and $250 for a dishwasher. Then $150+ each for external monitors.
Maybe this is what you wete refering to, but I could only find Bill Gates guessing grocery item prices:
It just depends on if you want nice stuff or really basic stuff. The nice stuff costs a lot more than the prices you quoted, just like a nice midrange car like a Camry costs a lot more than a basic, bottom-of-the-line car (Yaris?).
Considering the audience of this site, I would assume most here would buy higher-end stuff, and not the cheapest things available.
It's kinda like my fancy tea infuser cup: I have a nice glass mug with a laser-cut stainless-steel infuser for loose tea. It was $30 at a fancy store (could probably get it cheaper on Amazon), but it's a one-time purchase. With high-end loose tea, it makes great tea, but the problem is cleaning: cleaning out the infuser (by hand) is a lot more work than just dumping a tea bag in the trash and putting a regular mug in the dishwasher. But the results certainly are a lot better than a $0.20 tea bag.
To highlight the absurdity of this estimate: $2000 USD should be enough to pay for an entire work-from-home setup with a high quality office chair, an ergonomic keyboard, and a whiteboard in addition to what I have mentioned above (assuming that work provides your computer).
Although it’s not 4K, given the fact that it ships with a color calibration report I think calling it “some gaming monitor” is a bit silly.
As someone who’s a bit of a picture quality fanatic (I preferred color accurate panel displays “before it was cool”, my television is a 4K HDR10 OLED, etc.) I think it’s quite ridiculous that you’d classify your suggestions as anything other than luxuriously decadent for most programming work.
Edited to remove a claim that I haven't seen 4k monitors, since I just realized the big displays we can get must be 4k. We can only have one of those though and they're not as fancy as you're claiming.
You could also make or buy cold brew coffee (Amazon Fresh delivers large Chameleon cold brew containers to many areas). It stays fresh pretty long if you keep it refrigerated.
Is this a joke??? Just buy a coffee machine like a normal person.
You just have to move to one of their delivery areas, such as Christiansburg, Virginia.
But, yes, if you're looking purely for the caffeine and nothing else, a cheap coffee machine is the way to go.