Generate impressive-looking terminal output, look busy when stakeholders walk by
github.com
github.com
A worse experience I had previously was a manager who could remote-log-in to my machine at random times to spot-monitor my work. I'd see a little icon pop up in the menubar which would tell me he was there, so I'd make haste to busy myself with the appearance of grokking hard code. May he find a never-peace in purgatory.
But also I can't tolerate WFH for more than a few days at a time. I need external structure to tell my brain that it's work time.
What if someone comes along and is like "I'm going to provide the exact same service, but without offices and everybody works from home".
That company would have a competitive edge, because: people from the established company would have a reason to work for WFH company instead, WFH company would have significantly less expenses (more profits/budgets).
Does the fact that WFH is not a thing mean that in the real world, for most people, coming to the office IS actually more efficient? Or does this just need more time? I'm honestly not sure, but I've sure been tempted to start a competitor to very silly old fashion "you shall come here and sit at a computer where I can see you" type companies.
I don't think the labor market is efficient to such a degree that we can draw this conclusion. Lots of startups are doing this, but it takes time, capital and luck to achieve the success of the big corporate competitors, which have a huge amount of middle management who hate WFH.
You will then be folded into the organisation, maybe the initially hired staff will retain certain perks but they will be eroded with time, and new joiners to the project would never be afforded the same.
I mean there are tons of companies offering 1 or 2 day WFH, but what I was referring to was 100% remote. No office.
The „on average” is key however. I’d say that most of the people don’t understand the cost of remote work until it hits them and simply not all can bear that cost.
It’s not like people are unwilling (occasionally you can find slackers) but it’s more often things like issues caused by functioning without micromanagement (which is the case in many companies), problem with written communication skills, communication process not efficient for remote work (e.g. water cooler knowledge share which is foundational for people breaks without water cooler) etc.
Then there’s self-drive requirement that can easily be extinguished by home conflicts, non-prepped environment or depression coming from isolation and lack of physical movement. Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)
From my experience, both remote work proponents and opponents are right with their arguments but the crowd cannot be generalized. Some will suck at the desk, some will suck in remote.
As for „sit where I can see you” - that’s a standard offshoring practice, nothing new. You do get to the point of „who watches the watchers” conundrum sooner or later ;)
It is 99% extinguished by low pay though. Low pay means person can't afford better living environment, can't afford leaving toxic partner, can't afford to go out or hobbies which leads to depression.
> Efficient teams are more difficult to create when there is no space for people to bond over non-work (team pizza/social events)
That has nothing to do with efficiency. If you create fake family or cult environment, then it is easier to manipulate workers to do unpaid overtime. They "go hard" until they burn out and they then are thrown away like a trash by the corporation. Efficient teams are composed of happy people, who live in healthy environment. You can't have efficient worker who is worried more about their bills than their current ticket.
Its a whole lot more sustainable if you can build an identity around "here is my team, we are building {___}", and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
Genuinely clear objectives can also be a great asset here; but I find that clarity doesnt scale. When Ive been a contractor working on projects measured in weeks or months with small teams, full remote is easy. At corporate gigs where the thing you are doing might be several abstraction layers from a customer; its harder to answer "why are we doing this?". In the second case being able to share in person is important; because its not just the work its the context and other people doing it thats grounding.
That motivation brings efficiency; at least for myself.
Usually burn out is also caused by bad management. For instance, noisy open plan office where developers are mixed with sales and other departments to "cross pollinate" and have "creative juices flowing". Most people can't really focus on work and then are blamed for poor performance. If you have bills to pay, you often actually work after work, when you go home, to meet deadlines. Other instance I saw - "busy" meetings throughout the week, repetitive stuff, so certain people can be seen as they are "managing", also peppered throughout the day so you don't get more than an hour of uninterrupted work. Then again blame "why this and that is not delivered?".
> and its a lot easier to get there if you meet in person frequently.
I accept that some people struggle to adapt to online asynchronous communication, but in person meetings are inefficient from creative point of view. They disrupt flow and don't give opportunity for everyone to be heard. Some people can give answers or ideas instantly (not necessarily a good ones) others need information to simmer in their heads for a while. You of course get a sense of achieving something, but this won't be optimal. Basically just cheap dopamine.
> its harder to answer "why are we doing this?"
Answer is actually simple. To pay the bills, have roof over one's head, to have kids in good school, to enjoy life outside of work. If you are employee or contractor, you are not building your own thing. It's good to always remember that and keep a healthy distance.
If you dont understand the impact what you are doing has once its out of sight, how can you understand yourself as part of society?
Contracting is simpler in a way, "I made a tool for Steve so that he can better do his job" is an easy to understand story, and doing that 10 times a year makes your connections to the world fairly clear (Not to mention it builds on itself, as more people know you as someone who can make things for them).
Big corporate jobs, especially highly distributed remote ones, can make it nearly impossible to clearly draw a line like that. The narrow context of "I improved a tool that the Widget team uses to support the Tools team who build visualizations for the Documentation team" thirty layers down before you get to a thing customers touch. In person becomes important, because it lets you better understand the context of your work as "Part of the institution that makes fighter jets".
From what I've read—and my first- and second-hand experience bears this out—some of the most important factors in whether someone burns out on their work (besides straight-up overwork, which should be painfully obvious) are
1. Feeling like their work is meaningful (as opposed to just shuffling numbers from one spreadsheet to another or something)
2. A sense of autonomy and ownership over their work (as opposed to being micromanaged and ordered to do a bunch of work that they don't understand the purpose of—see #1—or actively disagree with)
3. Feeling like they themselves are valued, in the ways that actually matter to them (as opposed to being given "participation prizes", told thank you for your 4-week 100-hour crunch sessions, here's a $10 gift certificate, etc).
(Note that #3 can be the trickiest, because what feels validating for one person might not for another. In particular, from my own experience, one of the things the division someone I know was in liked to do as a "reward" at the end of a particular period of work was to host a social gathering or party...but the person I know working there was introverted and shy, and this felt more like a chore than a reward. For others, though, it was meaningful and fulfilling.)
From everything I've seen, it's true that it's often easier to build these things with an in-person team, but a lot of that is just because that's what most of us are used to and have experience working with. I firmly believe that as we move forward with more remote work, we will, as a society, get much, much better at building the kind of camaraderie and bonding over the Internet that we have well-understood methods of doing in person now.
Thankfully that's just an opinion, and the stats bear out the opposite.
Regretfully, managers and workers who want to RTO will force us to do so regardless.
Can you support that claim with stats?
Maybe, depending on the tasks. Also it depends on whether or not you take the view of the employee or employer. Say you work 8 hours a day (which even people in offices don't do) as the employer I do agree that you might get more done if people are in the office, but as the employee, I'll add my commute as well, so I now work 9 - 10 hours per day, part of which is completely unproductive. You also need to factor in that there is a shit ton of people who are fairly unproductive even at the office, they just look busy.
There are some fields where I can easily see the office being more productive in general, but you also have tasks where you move people for no reason. I think accounting is a pretty good example of a job that almost never require you to be at the office. Many companies even outsource this to other companies that most definitely isn't at the same office.
If you instead hired people to do a job, not be in front of a computer for 8 hours, then you could probably have an even higher level of efficiency. Imagine working from home, have a stack of assigned tasks for the day and be informed that once those are done you free to spend whatever remain of your eight hours as you please. I assure you that people will get shit done at light speed.
It's about management, and management mostly have not, and have no desire to evolve to handle work-from-home. You need better managers, more highly trained managers and managers that works harder than they do in the office, which many of them don't want to.
Also once the majority of a team is WFH, it's very tempting for management to take this one step further and start supplementing, then replacing, with off shore workers
That has been my impression, too, but not for very good teams and often to a fairly small extent.
The bigger issue with WFH is that it requires a management that can write well, do virtually all comms asynchronously and still quickly spot and address both technical and people issues. My 2c.
Sadly yes. I was grumbling about finding a solution to a problem and a colleague overheard me and supplied a perfect solution, as he had the same issue a month before. Same colleague was grumbling about needing a specific non-OSS software and the paperwork around requesting it and I told him we have a subscription already and he can get access to it. Wouldn't have happened if not in the office.
My boss tries to keep me informed of what's happening and what will come, but often enough the best stuff is learned serendipitously at the coffee machine. A couple of times I challenged what I learned and it ended up correcting our strategy and saving money.
WFH is still a thing despite some big names pulling back on it.
That's an interesting "fact".
That's diabolical
So my tasks were inflationed to occupy the whole day on those days I didn't have enough work for 8 hours.
That really messes up your statistics.
Is that a British thing? I've only ever heard that from people working in the UK, but there it doesn't seem to be uncommon.
Back in the early '90s, I wrote an MS-DOS TSR (Terminate and Stay Resident) "boss key" program. It would bring up a fake TurboC compilation screen whenever I pressed a key - just in case my boss walked in while I was playing a game. (The tricky part was restoring the graphics state back to normal, but that's another story.)
My boss wasn’t stupid. After a few close calls, he started asking why my compilation was taking so long without producing any results. That motivated me to improve my "boss key" app - I ended up adding line numbers that incremented on the screen, making it look like the fake compilation was actually progressing.
But yeah I remember a lot of games had boss-keys that would let you pretend to be working.
The classic "fun" TSR use-case was to make an app that installs an interrupt vector to decode mouse hardware "events" directly from the RS232 port before exiting via 0x21h, so that DOS screen would display a pointless "native" mouse cursor that doesn't do anything :)
When I say mouse cursor, I mean an ASCII block character with the blink bit on.
I implemented a password protected access to A:
Back when I was first becoming an adminsys, colour in the terminal was pretty rare. Emoji's certainly didn't exist even as a concept in the west at that point either.
However, a senior sysadmin on my team said "when you're writing your management scripts, remember to add colour codes if things are good or if they are not good. Managers freaking love that". He was incredibly right, and though the development team avoided colour codes (they can mess with things like stdout redirection) the admin team leaned into them- and the managers lapped it up like crazy.
"Red bad" is a universal language in our culture, and it makes managers feel like they understand, I guess.
it is interesting how this difference can exist though.
I left the room because I didn't want to be on camera, and in no time they were recording in front of my screen because it looked "cool, busy and profesional".
I had an experience where a team of Rust juniors did whatever they wanted in a separate chat and the CTO, PM and I (Lead) had no idea what was going on. This tool would have helped. Now, I’ll focus on the code review to see how Rust's safety helped solve this issue. I think this will be a topic for a great new article about the power of Rust.
I understand the need to unplug every so often as much as anyone. There are days when my brain just isn't in sync with what I have to do. Pretending you are doing work is insulting.
BTW, I didn't come up with this idea. This rule was given to me by a former boss when he hired me. The idea stayed with me as I launched and ran my own businesses.
Nothing is, of course. For me it is a simple statement of what should be obvious consequences for an action.
I usually present it like this: If you are going to goof off, goof off. Don't pretend you are working. We all need mental breaks. Don't think people are stupid. If you choose to insult them by pretending to be working, you are going to lose you will be fired.
I had to institute this when I realized a salesperson was spending time on eBay and dating sites rather than, well, selling. He would do the thing where he'd click over to Excel or whatever when I approached. Again, how stupid do they think people are?
He would wait for sales to come in by phone or through the website, rather than actively networking and prospecting. The lack of engagement was obvious from the numbers he was (or, more accurately, was not) producing. So, I installed software to remotely monitor his company-provided computer (and record it for evidence). While I was doing this I thought "How stupid are you that you think you can fuck with an engineer?".
It didn't take long to amass a week's worth of data showing he was spending over 50% of his time (Even up to 75% on some days) during work hours on eBay, dating sites and more. The following week he was gone.
What sucks is that we spent time and money training this idiot and bringing him up to speed with products, technology, etc. What a waste of time and human potential.
I love the line from Phantom Menace: Your focus determines your reality.
In all seriousness though, we’re assuming in this case that you’re taking a break, and a stakeholder happens to walk past - hopefully not a constant occurrence.
Based on Google Scholar the best match is this article by researchers from Imperial College, London:
Tensor Networks for Multi-Modal Non-Euclidean Data:
https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.14998
Looks like a very legit game changing and ground breaking work.
Hollywood was created in 2014 and has been used by NBC News, CNBC, on Saturday Night Live, the Netflix series Unit 42, Yahoo Finance, and in TV commercials for Experian and SentinelOne, the DEFCON music channel, Full Frontal by Samantha Bee, an episode of Map Men, a parody music video by SUSE, the Spy Ninjas series on Youtube, and magazine articles such as this one from Texas A&M University.
Check it out if you like this kind of thing.
Yet, it was only when I had the terminal open, running a few basic commands, that people would stop by and say—impressed—"Oh, I didn’t realize you could code."
Some years ago I used to copy reddit threads in Notepd++ and move the window on top of Visual Studios output window tonread reddit half on the day.
:D
He was not happy.
I didn't do that long enough to really put it to the test, though. Eventually I switched to working on side projects instead, which look similar to what I was normally doing. And worst case scenario, I could argue that it is for training or something, which wouldn't entirely be a lie.
career|saved stakeholders|impressed
Maybe it is very useful for the movie industry or something.
In order to leave Python coding demo tut GIF/MP4 on their monitor(s) at conferences or science fairs.
stemkiosk arithmetic in Python GIF v0.1.2: https://github.com/stemkiosk/stemkiosk/blob/e8f54704c6de32fb...
Slacking off while waiting for some performance tests to run (Shoutout to Locust.io!) with my big 27" screen full of terminals for each runner, server logs etc.
...And then on my laptop screen I honestly was just slacking off and reading Reddit.
'VP Of Technology' comes over "I dont know what you are doing, but it's the most impressive thing I've seen in a while".
...Yes sir!
I was _actually_ busy enough, and the cubicle walls were high enough then, that I virtually never used it as a real "boss key." But it's fun to make this kind of thing.
Would be a fun look, with the added bonus of some colleagues potentially being tricked into thinking they have an opportunity to mess with my machine. :D
also: gopher://magical.fish/1/news
I first discovered this in a sierra quest game and as a kid didn't know what it meant. I found out only years later.
Or helping understand people that engineers need thinking time.
Old people fall for it easily, and don't know that you can hit F12 or something to go into window mode and close it. I had to "fix" that virus a few times recently.
I haven't read the code, and I wonder if there's excessive focus on performance, safety, and modern programming paradigms for a fake productivity app such as this.