Most employees can screw around websurfing or shopping just as well at work as at home. They mostly do it because they are bored. Give them interesting, meaningful work and they will be productive.
How much meaningful and interesting work do you think exists in this world?
Every time this topic gets brought up, someone will say "Just give people interesting work, pay them well, don't micromanage them!" as if these jobs grow on trees. And even if these jobs do exist, they're usually reserved for workers who are extremely motivated and capable - in other words, they earned those rights. (except the zero interest covid era).
I think meaningful work often leads to very interesting discussions because people always imagine stuff like humanitarian aid, etc as meaningful. While certainly true, it’s not limited to jobs like those.
In my experience work can be meaningful for something as simple as being a positive change in someone’s job, customer experience or whatever. I personally spent quite a while in a job where a lot of project have been cancelled midway through or were objectively useless to begin with (busywork). This feeling of spending substantial time in my life to work on something that nobody will ever see or perceive as something positive burned me out terribly. And no amount of work life balance and good pay could make that up.
I now have a different job (Fullstack Developer) at the same company. I work more focused and it is more challenging, my salary hasn’t changed substantially beyond inflation. But customers use our product and are satisfied with it, plus it brings revenue to the company. This job is so much more meaningful in a practical sense than the one before.
And there is quite a lot of jobs like my first one. And if you actually believe in a market working as intended, this begs the question: why?
As a developer, there's a huge difference between those two : - working on something where, outside of your peers, you can only interact with a project manager who doesn't have a clue about what they are doing and are asking for features that are clearly dark patterns in the hope of making more money - working on something where you interact directly with the end users, knowing their issues/needs, and trying to find ways to help them while keeping management happy
Sure, the _why_ can be important (I would not work on something designed to harm directly anyone) but the _who_ is what matter the most IMHO. Knowing that you are working to help people is where the meaningfulness relies. Don't care if those people are people with special need, doctors and greedy lawyers.
If you're willing to take a salary cut, lots.
There are also lots of technical fields that vastly underpay due to the number of people that want to do it (eg. video games industry) and/or the lack of demand or immediate utility (eg. academia and research).
There's also art, film, stage, music, and all of the liberal arts.
Imagine what you want to do, then find a job that hits close to that. It might not pay well, but it might satisfy you.
(Especially building startups. What a slog that is. The fun part is building the product, and that’s a fraction of what you have to do.)
Rip off the band aid and feel some pain.
The problem with academia for me (at least here in the US) is the amount of money I have to piss away to even get a fraction of a chance to work in it. You could convince me to sacrifice money to work on something interesting, but you can’t convince me to pay you a shitton of money to have a chance of maybe working on something interesting.
That said, a lot of jobs simply don't have a constant stream of work that needs to be done, with the work available being dependent on when the customer chooses to engage. It is likely that for a lot of jobs downtime is just the name of the game and without changing customer habits there isn't much you can do.
For me work avoidance is a symptom of not having enough interruption free time. And in-person is actually substantially worse than remote.
Most of the problems I’m working on you can’t bang out in 10 minutes. Reality is that for some problems you need a highly skilled engineer to spend 4-8 continuous, highly focused hours producing iterations or trying to troubleshoot a broken build in a 20,000 line log file across 100 interconnected dependencies. So if you’re going to be productive it requires a time commitment and a certain working style.
It would be wonderful for employers and employees alike if computer work was always interesting. But it just isn’t. Amazon Turk workers are in front of computer out of necessity and probably would like to commit the least amount of work for the maximal possible reward. I happen to be of slightly better means but share their sentiment exactly.
And yet they don't. That is not because they are bored, but because they fear the possible failure.
I'd rather write a new feature with clean code and improve the existing code base in the meantime.
The real game changer is axing all scheduled internal meetings. No standups, no weekly grooming, no syncs. Scrap these time-wasters and you'll be surprised at the productivity spike. If not, then you likely don't have the right people working for you.
Remote work offers very little structure. As someone who thrives on autonomy and chafes at process this always felt great to me, but a lot of people thrive with a bit of structure. These days I’m of the opinion that remote work needs to both adapt to not demand too much structure, but also needs to mindfully provide enough that people can work effectively. Most people on my team have around 5 to 6 hours of standing meetings each week, plus ad-hoc synchronous discussions when they seem valuable. That seems to be the right balance for my team but every team will be different in the exact numbers.
The important thing I think is to let the structure emerge naturally and serve a specific purpose rather than doing meetings to replicate in-office processes or to serve some theoretical process.
Wow that is a lot. That is (almost) a WHOLE DAY of meetings each week just for syncs.
I can only provide my own anecdotes, but I'm at 0.5-1hr for standup status-report type meetings.
My team skews a bit junior right now, and I generally expect a pretty high degree of autonomy. We’re not a feature factory and people aren’t pulling tickets from a backlog mindlessly- I expect them to understand what they are building, why, talk to users, take ownership of a problem and exercise sound judgement. That requires some coordination. More senior people can handle that with less structure. For a highly competent but less experienced engineer I’ve found asking them to work mostly asynchronously was setting them up for failure. Giving the a bit of structure, making them available to one another to help themselves grow, and giving me more opportunities to recognize when I needed to intervene early has been successful.
For some teams it might feel like too many meetings, but that’s why I said that you need to pick what works for the specific team. Don’t cargo cult process and structure, but don’t be afraid of it when it can help either.
I've found a singular Slack message at the start of the day more than enough for stuff like daily standups or whatever, literally no reason to drag people into a meeting for crap like that.
Jeeeesus... Yeah, I bet your engineers thrive.
It's amazing how difficult this is for so many managers out there though.
https://learningcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/taking-breaks/ https://hbr.org/2023/05/how-to-take-better-breaks-at-work-ac...
Sure, let's factor in breaks, but let's also factor time spent in meetings, emails, interviewing candidates, maintenance work, capitalization work, training new hires, R&D, etc, etc.
Only then can we understand the true costs of this kind of labor. Taylor had factories where it was easy to inspect and measure. If you want the kind of scientific management that shows a measurable increase in how long and how many breaks that a knowledge working should take, then you need detailed data on their baseline productivity.
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:—
We murder to dissect.
Ok, with high school poetry class over…this “scientific management” approach seems to hold a particular appeal to technical types, who also say it could never apply to them. So bravo for volunteering your own working life to the altar of manageable metrics, but for me, I’d rather not.
I already fill out hourly timesheets as I work in legal services and we bill clients by the half hour, albeit just for external purposes.
This isn’t just Taylorism. I’m also describing Activity-Based Costing, a key component in managerial accounting for high complexity services and products with lots of fixed costs.
Most non-VC backed companies engage in such practices.
This if course needs to:
1.) come from the top down. The CEO should be doing the same thing, and
2.) have an incentive structure tied directly to profits and “public” reporting.
Buy-in from the entire organization is required and everyone must be motivated to keep costs under control.
Look at the efficiency of software developers for Formula 1 teams. Any additional costs in that division impacts time spent in the wind chamber, etc, because there is a cap if $190 million per team.
They are motivated to win and their costs are constrained by the format.
Motivation for organizational cost analysis must be shared amongst all employees.
The result of this approach, centered on metrics, ranking, making lists and using “objective data”? They almost killed the golden goose. The successes dropped off and the averages declined. The tech side finally had to back off, and those people are back to acting like they always did.
Now that I’m back at my regular job (which, I must concede, is an amazing job on paper and something I spent a lifetime getting to), I can barely survive the day and have zero energy after 16:00.
People are paid to work because their labor is valuable. That is in no way mutually exclusive with how interesting and meaningful the job is. Jobs at the intersection of employer value and employee interest are obviously the most desirable. I'd imagine every laborer attempts to maximize these two qualities of their day job.
However, some roles lend themselves more easily to find meaning in them, think e.g. roles with patient contact in health care. Or the gaming/entertainment industry.
As a consequence, the competition on the labor side is much fiercer, and as a consequence of that, pay is lower and the chance for exploitation is higher.
So the GP basically has stated the contraposition of this effect: you get paid more if you do (what most perceive as) less meaningful work.
Well, again - there are these golden jobs that offer both. As an example, if you're good enough as a rendering programmer with video games experience, you can command almost any kind of salary, work wherever you want, and change jobs at a whim - because any games company will pay you your weight in gold to employ you. And (while not a given) the opportunity to work on something meaningful/interesting there is very high.
This quote probably has less meaning now than it did, but I think it still holds. Part of this though is finding joy in doing things that you don't naturally enjoy. There are miserable or lazy people that will not enjoy anything other than self pleasure.
At the office, websurfing/shopping wold have felt like a complete waste of time, where doing the laundry or cleaning my room is definitely not. Emotionally some of the home chores will feel more meaningful than many bullshit tasks we do.
This was one of the prime reasons I switched job, even as the pay was mostly the same. Doing a job that feels meaningful in itself is I think more precious than ever.
This has happen the last 3 days, each day I learned something I would unlikely have learned any other way. I had stuff to share with him too.
This is what I don't personally get from "work from home". I'm in no way suggest you should therefore work from office. I'm only relating my experience. This type of experience has been common in my career but maybe I'm an outlier.
We throw "BTW this or that..." several times a day, it's obvious that we can, sometimes via DM, sometimes on specific or generic channels, depending on who we think might be interested in it. Knowledge propagates, discussions ensue, sometimes the original topic devolves into something else and ideas are born.
That's on top of a ~1h tech sync meeting every other week, where anything goes, questions get asked, ideas get challenged, notes get taken.
It works. In my experience it works better than watercooler because it's non-interruptive, scales across TZ, and everyone gets a chance to jump in or catch up later.
My experience in the sync up meeting is it's too formal. When I meet in real life people have conversations, 2-3 people per. In the sync meetup, 12 people wait for one person.
So at least for me, it doesn't work.
Working remote has sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
Then mark me in the “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it” column. My social life is already full. Don't make me commute for the benefit of those who are not so lucky.
A platoon of conventionally acceptably dressed drones sat at generic desks furiously typing in a nondescript openspace where soundproofing creates cathedral silence causing the slightest noise to be annoying so every single one is glued to their screen with headphones on is what sucked all the personality and humanity from work imo.
I find it much more personal and humane to have a Zoom call with a child-lapped coworker dressed with a tacky Hawaiian shirt, getting to say hi to their passing SO (should they find me comfortable to do so), or talking about the guitar visibly sitting in the background (should they elect to share).
> “I don’t want to talk to my coworkers ever if I can avoid it”
This is highly demeaning to an underestimated portion of the population. I can understand that some people thrive in the physical company of others, while others find it enjoyable but mentally draining.
While the former feel distress when forced to work remotely, the latter feel equal distress when forced to come to the office, suffer random smalltalk - because not all watercooler talk is That Next Big Breakthrough - that is not socially acceptable to walk away from, and end up feeling miserably inefficient the rest of the day.
Historically, the "watercooler kind" had the higher ground, and during lockdown they got to get a taste of what the second kind feels like when required to come to the office, yet now that the table has turned again the improbable opportunity for balance and understanding that COVID inadvertently created is lost as most fail to acknowledge the other side's suffering.
Mutual understanding is the only way out of this conflict. I would respectfully beg for people emitting such quips as the quoted one to openly reach out and genuinely try to understand why it looks like some people seem to act in such ways.
Many are working on enterprise CRUD apps where I'd argue you don't have to come to the office on the off chance that some watercooler chats will bring some innovation.
Have some proper planned 'innovation' workshops either on or offsite or a mix of both.
I have sympathy for this person, but I can't work in this environment. Headphones can't be worn 8 hours a day.
My story is an anecdote, and moving seats was not an option. For this situation I might as well be remote if I'm not next to the team.
p.s. I spend most of my working day with headphones on, it is perfectly possible.
Younger peoples mental health has a lot more to do with wasting time in a office, but you can keep thinking that if it helps. I'd wager that younger people could learn a bit from older in this area.
In the end, we do what we think is best and I'll continue heavily advocating for remote work. Good luck!
There is a distinction to be made between loneliness and solitude though.
One can feel hopelessly lonely in a crowd, one can also find great solace in solitude.
In fact, another great cause of mental health issues is the apparently growing inability for people to stay still, instead constantly vying for interaction (and often resorting to that quick virtual dopamine hit loop, sometimes even when face to face)
There's balance to be had, both ways, but not everyone have the same needs.
I agree, not everyone has the same needs. But I think on average the majority of people would benefit from or would be able to handle a mandatory hybrid situation. If a few fully remote jobs remained that may satisfy the few unusual people who are actually that disturbed by social interaction, or live in such odd locations that it's not possible for them, that would be great. And I am absolutely sure those opportunities will remain. But I think it is bad for humans to aim for a mainly remote working world, both for our mental health and for the dynamism of our collaborative work. I really believe that people who genuinely thrive significantly better in 100% remote vs a couple days in the office are less than 10% of the population. We are social animals and we increase our risk of dementia the less we socialise, it's just our biology.
You don’t know the culture. You don’t know anyone. Your questions are the “useless interruptions” people say they’re happy they get to ignore.
It’s very obvious that this is not a sustainable approach for most companies. Some companies will get remote culture right and get access to a niche of the employee market.
Overall, things will shift back to in person quickly. Look at startups at top VCs.
The meeting model is more like phone calls and, while I adore WFH, not well suited for that.
And 2), well, that sucks. Needs a suitable culture and the right setup...
My problem with the extraversion/introversion dichotomy is that I'm not either extreme. I am far too introverted to competently fulfil my basic social needs without some form of passive socialising like having an office full of people around me. I don't thrive with going out on the town and making friends like extraverts I know. But I'm definitely not the type of person that can not speak to people for weeks. I think that sort of person is sort of rare and should not be the basis of the entire system. I honestly think that level of introversion is not what most people even mean when they talk about introversion. That is highly unusual and is not how human nature usually works.
I like that and the description that follows because it shows how much the whole thing is neither monochromatic nor even linear. Even when talking inside an {ex,in}troversion model there are all sorts of subtle mechanisms and processes at play, and that's not even beginning to talk about other aspects, from varying shades of ADHD, Asperger, or autistic traits, to delayed sleep disorder syndrome.
It does not follow that the deep social interaction that is beneficial to mental health has to happen at work.
One can WFH and see people outside of work. Some people enjoy deep social ties with coworkers, others prefer keeping work at a distance from their personal life.
> People naturally talk to each other in physical spaces.
That is incorrect. Some people do, some others don't.
There are loads of places like this. The irony is that in such context people enjoy the watercooler talk as an escape from the hellscape that is their 9-5 shitty job, doing everything they can instead of their job to make their experience less miserable.
> I've never had that experience.
Lucky you.
> And never ever have I had a colleague spontaneously try to have casual zoom conversation with me while remotely working.
This has happened all the time for me (could be zoom, could be Slack). From scheduled informal chats with teammates to regular chats with close people to members of non-work or work channels of interest to random ones via Donut with yet unknown people, it's lively and on everyone's own terms.
> I've had people never turn their cameras on.
Ever since I have been remote they all did. If they don't it's either one of the odd low bandwidth situation and they save it for an acceptable audio experience, they're on the move - and open about it, with either an apology about possible noise when speaking thus unmuted or setting expectations about their ability to talk or follow - and audio only "phone mode" is more practical, or they're at home and privacy respecting of their SO or otherwise guest.
> And meanwhile, I'm here, a childless 20-sth, not having spoken to a human in days, wanting to hang myself with my headphone cable.
I am genuinely empathetic to your situation and am glad to hear from a nearby comment that it has resolved - at least to an extent - and you found an environment where you can be happier.
I say so because I realised long ago that people can come from all ways of life and be wildly different in their needs, and having been through similar suffering for something in the order of three decades - only from a symmetrical end - I can relate.
And I say "end" and not "side" because it's a continuum, there are no sides, there's no team A vs team B, and it's not a zero sum game.
> The pro-wfh people just don't care that young people are still growing up in this time I swear.
By and large "pro WFH people" are not arguing that everyone-and-their-dog must WFH, instead that WFH does make sense and is a true net positive for many, and that the recent pro-office-for-everyone discourse that it is inherently more productive because humans is at best loaded with prejudice that fails to take into account a good chunk of actual humans, some raising their voice, others staying silent, and at worst has hidden agenda.
The pendulum was mostly stuck one way for aeons, then it progressively moved with the rise of the Internet, and swung full-force with COVID. Now it's swinging back hard the other way. Change is hard, old habits die harder, but I'm hopeful that someday we'll find balance, but for that we need understanding of each other.
I have had shitty office experiences don't get me wrong, but since becoming a software engineering professional, I find that I am in enough demand to actually choose a decent place to work. Since entering this field, I had one horrifying remote job where I never learnt what my colleagues looked like and felt miserable and demotivated all the time, and I've worked two other places where I've been more in the office. When working in the office, I've never had horrible experiences like I did when I worked shitty non-professional jobs. Being a software engineer is cushy as hell and I find it weird how some people complain about their tech workplaces as if they're not some of the chillest places to work in person that you could possibly be lucky enough to work in.
Thank you for your empathy for my past situation. However, the problem when pro-wfh people say "we want you to have a choice" is that my shitty remote job was technically hybrid. I could go into the office. People even tried to organise a single office day a week. And because it wasn't mandatory, half the time I tried going in the place was a ghost town. I don't want that, ever. So yeah I LOVE that my job has (semi)MANDATORY days otherwise there would be so many colleagues of mine I would never have met and I am great friends with them (By semi mandatory I mean we have a 3 day target average. So you're not penalised for missing a week or sth its just the mode of your weeks should be 3 days. Which is a great system)
Basically, for me to have a choice to live the way I want there HAS to be companies with MANDATORY office days. And the pro-wfh people demonise that SO MUCH.
If I am waiting for code to compile and I'm tired, the most interesting thing happens on my phone not what I need to do next, regardless of what that is
For how it could work you can look at worker-owned cooperative structures, sociocracy, etc
The one customer owned cooperative I have worked for did limit equity to one share per shareholder, in addition to being the most pathologically corporate and political company I have ever worked for or known off. Maybe worker owned cooperatives work better.
I would certainly not want to work at a non-worker-owned cooperative. That's not an incentive alignment for me as a worker, and it's a hierarchy placed above workers. Customer-owned coops are only meant to be good for the customer, it’s standard hierarchical wage labor bs for workers.
Not that worker-owned ones are able to avoid politics though - all social relations have varying degrees of success and conflict.
If people are so bored and idle to the point that they can just screw around on the internet until the clock strikes 5 while the world keeps turning, then that's a huge red flag they're in a bullshit job.
The answer isn't to invent work for them to do. If there's nothing to do, then there's nothing to do. They should probably go home and spend time with their family, write a novel, do some home improvement, tinker, maintain their tools, do some chores. Now that's meaningful work.