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Comment by kioleanu | Hacker News Reader

I was always fascinated by these kind of things and I always wondered why they are necessary, as I had never had a job in the past 15 years where you couldn’t open a sports page once in a while. Or better said, where someone would expect you sit 6-8-10 hours in front of the computer and churn code without interruption. Or go outside and check the scores on your phone

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You have to bare in mind this appears to be an Indian site and a lot of companies in India have a very different culture to that of the Silicon Valley (or even London).

A few years back I worked for a company who had a UK branch. The boss at the UK office was generally nice enough, but very strict about what was allowed at the office. We managed all IT from the Danish office, and would notice that a certain hours in-bound traffic would increase a lot.

When we look into why we figured out that it was a few guys, working insane hours, who where streaming Champions League while working. Technically not allowed at the UK office, but the decision from the Danish IT Manager: "Fuck it! If they're still at work they should at least be allowed to watch a game".

Wisel*!

This is mostly true for services companies (TCS, Infosys, etc). A lot of restrictions are there because clients demand it. It is borne out of fear of data breach. So these companies goes few steps ahead and impose blanket ban of lot of things e.g can't plug USB devices to company provided laptops, No permissions to install anything (except whitelisted software).

On the other hand, new age product companies/startups are similar to Silicon Valley.

This is correct. It's generally the big consultancy firms that are ... unfun workplaces.

I worked for Microsoft about 10 years back. Unfun workplace. I thought it would be so fun to work there. I fought and got through three interviews. The team seemed cool initially. By week three I knew I had made a mistake. These people seemed so stodgy, so incapable of having a bit of fun. So utterly by the book. They almost seemed unable to deviate from the script. There was a sense of fear in the air that took a month or two to sense. I swore then I'd never work for another massive IT company and left after 6 months. I now focus on non-profits and I couldn't be happier. I get to work on cool projects that I often come up with. If I think I can build or code something better than what we have, I'm given the green light to do a working prototype. What more could I ask for? Sure, the pay is lower. But I work 8 hours and go home. There are no laborious crunch days trying to get something out the door. No meticulous, nasty meetings where everyone is playing one-upmanship, or buzzword bingo with gems like "synergistic" or using stupid phrases like "we tuned x and boom goes the dynamite", no talk of cross-functional team spearheading, no sharing an office with people who won't stop farting despite the nasty looks and obvious can of Glade. Give me a task, a deadline, a budget, and get out of the way. I have rarely asked for a software license. I can do most things with FOSS/Linux. I may ask for a Raspberry Pi to prototype something or a slice of a VM for Ubuntu Server. These things cost almost nothing. I truly enjoy getting things done with minimal resources. It's fun working within contraints like RAM, hardware specs. I could see how embedded work would be fun in this regard.

With everything in life--it depends on the team you work with. I work for a Fortune 50 company and in my first role the team was a lot of fun. We had Slack and the memes were borderline for a work environment but it was a high trust team. I switched to a new department and I feel like I work for the federal government. It's like there's a fear around expressing any emotion. There are pros and cons to each situation.

I used to work for a startup and that culture was a lot of fun at first but the "blow investor money on catered lunches every day but you can't hire more engineers" mentality seemed very childish to me. I learned that I like the middle ground.

Never had that as an issue in India as well for me. No one has questioned what I do in my desk or my computer, even in some of the large consulting companies.

Some entrepreneurs running their own companies find the idea of even a minute of employee's time they are paying for being spent on anything other than their actual tasks infuriating.

I’d agree with them if I was selling minutes of my time. I’m selling my ability to use computers to create business outcomes.

I agree to you but they often think they are paying for an entire work day of focused working. As to me, I actually find the idea of 8 hours (or even 6) of uninterrupted (even if we don't count bathroom and lunch breaks) focused working absurd. It would require taking meth or enormous will effort. To me it seems all the time of pure focused work (unless it requires almost no mental processing) per day can only add up to 4 hours or so. IIRC there even is a scientific paper supporting this.

>> I had never had a job in the past 15 years where you couldn’t open a sports page once in a while.

Let's talk about males in the workplace, and web filters.

Isn't it funny how web filters almost never block sports sites?

I worked with a woman who raged about this and was convinced that "People magazine is blocked, but ESPN isn't? It's because men built web filters!"

Interesting perspective.

It's because bosses regulate filters, and bosses are indeed men on average.

Cricket is a very long sport (up to 5 days for a test match) and quite often you don't actively watch it so much as keep an eye on it while you go about your day.

This is good because you can have the window open all day on one of your screens without it obviously being not work. Cricket.com.au has a similar option which emulates a spreadsheet https://live.cricket.com.au/bossmode/2836/51513/western-aust...

I remember in 2016 when Leicester won the premier league, pretty much everyone in a fairly large office (100+ people) just stopped working to watch one of the games on. I had to go to the toilet at some way through it, but just put it on the radio on my phone so I wouldnt miss anything. I didnt realise though, that for whatever reason the radio was about 5 seconds behind, so ditched even using it after hearing the entire office shake with cheering, and then the radio telling me 5 seconds later why.

I think before the open plan office frenzy it was quite normal. By the way, I discovered most of my friends WFH now and don't plan to quit, so maybe we can treat open-plan offices as a crazy fashion that appeared, persisted in spite of multiple studies showing it's bad for everybody (including micromanaging bosses), and now no longer makes sense as those who can WFH.

> I had never had a job in the past 15 years where you couldn’t open a sports page once in a while

Good for you!

But do you really not realise that other people work under less favourable conditions than yourself?

There's "less favourable", and "mind slavery" where can't look at anything non-work related.

It's weird for me that someone with technical skills to build a proper web application would have to be subject themselves to the latter one.

I mean, I assume these 'do this while you work' style applications are more of a joke than serious applications meant to subvert management.

The guy who built this is a programmer, not a call-center slave. It's not hard finding something better in this market.

When we actually used to go to office, we always replaced the CI/CD screens with live cricket feeds all over the office. It was much less distracting than opening a tab on your machine, and you could still stay updated with just a glance. As an exciting match would draw close to the end though, people would pay much more attention to the screens than their work.

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