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Comment by ericmcer | Hacker News Reader

I try to fight my primal instincts of jealousy, etc. but it really feels like a lot of the 'butts in chairs' type people like human resources, various managers, etc. have slowly cut back to basically responding to emails/messages and maybe working a few hours a week. If that is your definition of WFH being great than it is definitely going great for them.

As a dev it has kinda shredded my desire to do large scale unpredictable projects and made me pick up predictable boilerplate type work. One is easy to demonstrate progress on, the other is more abstract. This is also slowly eroding my passion for engineering so I may need a rebalancing.

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It’s coincidental to my section of the universe you mention what you did in the first paragraph:

You are the third person this week I’ve heard make some commentary to that effect or another: “anyone else feel like WFH has made work easier for everyone else BUT engineering? My tickets haven’t slowed down an iota yet support and product queues are lower than I’ve ever seen them on the (Trello) board”

Other than initially temporarily getting pulled in to work support for Citrix for our large organization converting from almost 100% onsite to 100% remote with almost everyone who had been desktop dependent getting Citrix access overnight, I feel like WFH has made work as a dev easier. It hasn't reduced expected velocity, but it has reduced meetings that should be emails, drop-in interruptions, distractions from people doing conference calls on speakerphones in an an open office, facilities issues, and commute stress.

I suspect it’s highly team-culture and org dependent, to be fair.

A friend in the American Southwest expresses just as you do: meetings have declined, “walk ups” have all but stopped and he’s more productive ever. My org? Literally the opposite in every listed factor.

In fact we had a meeting today as a functional team* about how we plan to put up some guardrails just for ourselves so we can get some shit done.

I am at least thankful to the Holy compiler our Director was on the zoom and has completely bought in and offered support because he sees the pain and agrees it’s a problem.

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* it’s not as ironic as it sounds, this was our usual Friday afternoon “have beers and just vent about the week over zoom” meeting. It’s quite healthy for the six of us as a lot of good outcomes have resulted from the calls during COVID from a comraderie standpoint And have a Director who will go to bat where he can.

> I suspect it’s highly team-culture and org dependent, to be fair

Sure, absolutely. I was sharing my experience, but I certainly didn't intend to claim it was universal.

If so: Get promoted.

I love it, because it has cut my commute down 10 hours/week and my dedicated meeting time 10 hours/week. That's 20 hours. Now I can dedicate 5 hours of that to taking walks or naps or cooking healthy food. 5~10 hours of that for more work. And 5 hours for the company. Generally a win for everyone, I think.

> As a dev it has kinda shredded my desire to do large scale unpredictable projects

I understand the anxiety that drives this and have found the best approach to be bringing that up to my manager, verifying those types of contributions are still welcome, why you think they are important for the business, and your desire to make sure your keeping up with "core functions".

I assume those "boilerplate type" tasks communicate their business value outwardly much better and are known quantities, but do little for your development.

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