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Comment by Gigachad | Hacker News Reader

I've just about given up trying with remote work tbh. I've found it just about impossible to collaborate with people since it seems everyone is out walking their dog otherwise unresponsive for most of the day. Occasionally I've attempted to start the day with a good attitude and try to get as much work done as possible but found that I still can't get much done since I'll have 5 in progress tasks all blocked by various people who never respond.

Occasionally work rents out a meeting room for the day and then we can actually get a full days work in where everyone is available and communication flows freely.

Job hunting to see if it's better at the next place but I'm not too hopeful since the last places have been so poor at remote work. Haven't been able to find anything which has an office these days.

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>I'll have 5 in progress tasks all blocked by various people who never respond.

Slackers are ruining WFH for everyone but if the company tolerates them slacking off like that it means that that's the company culture and getting stuff done doesn't matter.

I've had the same issue as a junior. Stagnated at a job where the team was WFH and full of slackers who wouldn't respond.

A lot of companies haven't built a system of properly mentoring juniors remotely and accountability where people WFH can also be trusted to do their job and not masquerade at doing work.

This is part of the problem I suppose. Top talent likes to get things done, will do it anywhere. There's always a group that gets nothing done, they're less visible when they WFH. But for the middle, how much productivity do they gain or lose by going remote? Also, the mix of "stars" is probably different on site or remote. Some people who really were crushed by commuting and working in a distracting office are shining at home, others who need that routine and comraderie are struggling to be as effective.

Voluntary office work probably helps, but friends of mine who liked being in the office talk about going to work to sit in an empty bullpen and do the same zoom/slack teamwork they'd do at home.

For me, I don't have the experience as I have a job that needs to be on site.

Do you really have 5 in-progress tasks a day... that are all blocked due to other people? I've never experienced that in software engineering/dev. I've experienced 5+ tasks per day as a code monkey; but never have I been completely and utterly blocked from doing any work at all -- because there's always something else I could be doing (see: backlog). And if I were still in the 5+ task per day camp, I would take my sweet time answering Slacks/etc.; because I'm already inundated with work, and breaking out of my flow to spend 15 minutes on a text chat that could have been 2 minutes through voice, is not something I'm going to do.

I do not understand it at all. Are you a junior/working on simple one-off tasks with inane deadlines everyday/not in engineering?

n.b. throwaway because I never post.

I've been in that situation (also due to unresponsiveness) as a senior developer working on complicated projects many times.

From past threads, I thought your problem was that you're depressed about not seeing people in the office. Now it's people walking their dogs too much? ;p

That sounds like an issue with the people blocking you. Someone who needs to be forced into an office to do the work, or even respond to urgent comms, sounds unreliable. If returning to office fixes that, my concern would be that same organization being unreliable for other reasons.

The black pill on WFH is that a lot of people are actually that unreliable and "forcing" them to work in an office makes them more reliable.

Turns out people are more likely to respond to Slack when their boss is behind their back. Who would have thought?

It sounds like a problem of organization (your tasks are too easy to block, maybe you lack autonomy or authority) and of communication and perspective (the colleagues who "never respond" have, or think they have, something more important to do, and you aren't able to convince them that helping you is useful) with far deeper roots than work from home.

If "communication flows freely" only when you put everyone in a meeting room, your team needs meetings: why don't you have virtual ones over video chat?

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