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Comment by kumarvvr | Hacker News Reader

The sense of sitting in office is a tremendous waste of time and potential is inescapable.

I work in the engineering industry and am lucky enough that I get to have privacy and my manager is good. I ensure I do my work and well at that.

But I know friends in IT who absolutely loathe the feeling of being in a monitored jail cell.

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Yeah but the real root cause (of that awful "I am wasting my time and life right now" feeling) is that modern office work often involves getting M hrs (M < 8) of real work done and having to stretch it to fit an 8hr shift. WFH masks that symptom very well but does not actually solve it.

IMHO it can actually be more frustrating because one feels more on the hook for keeping an eye on notifications. At least at the office I can zone out or focus on something personal or work related, safely assured if a boss really needs me I can be found in person, rather than just missing a ping and being assumed to be a slacker.

The above depends a lot on your company culture though. It's a common failure mode though.

Or just the ability to easily rearrange when I do those 8 hours to fit with appointments, flights, and other life events.

You need a chatbot that replies to messages with "I'm heads down on a task right now. I'll read your message when I have some time. If you need to interrupt me please reply with 'interrupt'." And if you get that keyword your chatbot plays a sound or texts you.

I mean, that's almost exactly how Slack's DND mode works. The thing is, it's too open to abuse by that one prick who stays on DND for months at a time, or (for less vitriol) maybe you just forget to turn it on/off, then you try to automate it and then never follow the schedule you set for yourself, etc., making it basically useless.

It's pretty difficult to fix bad social behavior with more tech.

On a tangential note, thanks to WFH, I've grown to hate clockwise with a passion. It's the single most disruptive tool in the remote workplace, especially when combined with private-by-default calendars. Maybe I only worked with bad users, I don't know. I just haven't seen anyone with that consistent a schedule, and no one pays attention to their calendar schedule after they set it once anyway. Have to set a meeting for 5 clockwise users? Tough, you'll either have to ask them individually if that time works, or just ignore calendars altogether and hope the relevant people make it work. I hope it dies soon.

Teams can do this. Create a calendar event or manually set yourself to busy and you will not receive notifications and people can see this. There is also a button on the sender side to mark the message as important to notify anyway.

> involves getting M hrs (M < 8) of real work done and having to stretch it to fit an 8hr shift. WFH masks that symptom very well but does not actually solve it.

Our team has a backlog of approximately 500 tickets / bugs / work ideas. Nobody has to stretch anything, the backlog will outlive us all.

Yeah, everyone has a backlog like that. A lot of them have very little or negative business value in retrospect, but we can't know that now, so we prioritize, and it's a good thing, because if we ever actually got most of that backlog done we'd have seriously diminishing returns to the point where we would not even be covering our wages by the end.

If you don't believe me, and your system allows this to be reconstructed, find out what your full backlog looked like about 10 years ago, find everything on there that still hasn't been done, and find out what percentage of them actually would have significant business value today.

I know this is a gross generalization but we are dealing in generalities. This is what I have found across many projects. We are not always great at predicting what we will need, and the backlog is BY DEFINITION prioritized. By the time we get down to the lowest priority stuff the statistical expected value gets low enough that we are not even covering our own wages.

And yet, pretending to work an extra 2 hours every day has even less value. BY DEFINITION.

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