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Comment by iforgotpassword | Hacker News Reader

I feel more distracted at home and miss the social interactions with coworkers. Video conferences are tiresome.

I miss the ad-hoc conversations with coworkers that lead to cool product innovation. I also miss being able to mentor junior engineers in person, and receiving in-person mentorship from my seniors.

I personally believe that we're all running on the trajectory and direction we scoped before the shut-down, and as we move into H1 planning next year, things are going to get much slower and more complicated.

But do you really need that from a company? I get that from coworking spaces. And if anything I'd argue it's more innovative.

Instead of a bunch of programmers spouting group think, I get to interact with writers, artists, indie game devs, etc. Way more innovative than any programmer group I've been in.

I prefer that when I'm working on my own projects, but at BigCo, I can't really do that :)

Well these folks will probably not have much context on what you are doing though. Offices are nice because people working in them have some shared reality, vision and goals. I know that the service or tool I build or use is built or used by another team for a specific purpose. A lot of the innovations I’ve seen happening are because humans with this shared reality try to solve one others problems, or at least talk about it. Many times, others will also actually help out if someone is stuck on something.

We need something to simulate this kind of shared reality somehow. Video conferences don’t do that. I’m sure there will be some innovation that might, I’m betting on cheap, high quality AR headsets. Right now it feels like in 2007... internet on cellphones was a thing but an iPhone with touchscreens had to be invented for something revolutionary to happen...

I couldn't really talk to random people at a coworking space unless they signed NDAs, which would be hard to enforce. Lots of IP and other secrets. Do people really discuss their work with strangers at coworking spaces? I've never worked in one so thats interesting/surprising. Maybe some more generic programming challenges could be discussed vs product/research specifics.

I'm the opposite. Without having to hear the two women sitting two rows back talking loudly about whatever the hell it is, or be interrupted 8 times a day by people in unrelated areas asking inane questions that are already documented on confluence...

Working from home has been amazing for my concentration levels.

Yes, one day someone is going to do a “this is your brain on Zoom” study and it will finally explain what many of us have been feeling.

Especially if you have a regular culprit who has crappy audio and keeps harshing the mic that gets tiring very quickly.

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