Working from home - the new normal

moycullen14

I presume if you're working at all, you're doing it from home now. How goes it?

If it become the new normal then you should be able to access great jobs from remote locations - the mythical 250K per year graduate job in SV, anyone?. Or will we all be outsourced by cheaper variants from god knows where. Interesting times.

DefinitelyMarc

I reckon places where remote work has succeeded will be more open to partial remote work (say 2 or 3 days a week), but I can't see it going full time for everyone.

If everywhere accepted full time remote work and wages went down low enough (due to offshoring), I think a lot of people would leave the industry. Also offshoring would thrive despite the reputation and make a lot of companies' codebases completely unmanageable, exacerbating the developers leaving the industry. </tinfoilhat>

Colonel Panic

There was already a flexible WFH option in my place of work - I rarely availed of it. I don't especially think it suits me personally 5 days a week.

I like in-person collaboration, tech chat and all that. It's harder over phone, Teams and the like, especially in a big company where networking with other teams is a way to get involved in other stuff, to learn, to get ahead.

Anima

My work was very flexible before this but now that I'm forced home, I don't like it as much. It's nice to leave the house and go to a place of work. It's much easier to "switch off" and just relax at home then but I find I'm just working more and longer now.

jester77

I was working 50/50ish home/office before all this kicked off. No real difference for me, just miss the catching up with colleagues over lunch, or having a beer in afternoon in the office with them.

Regarding remote, any of my friends that are doing proper remote jobs are paid based on their location. So there won't be much if any change there with regards to salary.

14ned

moycullen14 wrote: »

I presume if you're working at all, you're doing it from home now. How goes it?

If it become the new normal then you should be able to access great jobs from remote locations - the mythical 250K per year graduate job in SV, anyone?. Or will we all be outsourced by cheaper variants from god knows where. Interesting times.

I was fully remote beforehand anyway, so my only change is now I must work from home instead of at the office I rent. Just before all this, my company was hiring a bunch of new remote workers, anywhere in the EU timezones, paying a gross of €120-140k a year. But all hiring got shelved until after this passes.

They were only interested in highly self-adapting senior folk capable of almost always doing the right thing without direction, oversight nor training, with long track records in open source. They're tough to find, even from a global work pool. Point is though, there are jobs going like that in Ireland, you just need to have a very specific skillset.

Working from home has maybe 75% the productivity of working from my office. Mainly because of the kids who like to come see me throughout the day, but also because lunches bleed out their slot when the weather is nice, and also to be honest because I'm not sleeping well, part of which is due to lack of gym. But it could be a lot worse, a ton of folk out there don't have a job anymore.

Niall

TuringBot47

Worked from home typically only 1 day a week pre-Corona.
2 days a week in job before that.

Delighted to avoid 2.5 hrs of commuting per day and the idea that the company might embrace more remote working post-Corona, which was hinted at.

On the downside... that will mean a lot more competition for jobs nationally and internationally for 100% remote working jobs in the future.
The globalization of labour, maybe even to the point of less permanent jobs and more contracts for I.T. in the future.

rainbow kirby

I usually prefer being the office, with the odd WFH day. I like the social aspect and the fact that I can discuss things with coworkers face to face. I also think that you end up with *more* pointless meetings working remotely.

Bit of a moot point though, because I'm currently furloughed from work.

dotsman

Working from home is fine when it is a day or two at a time (and have done so for many years). But working from home does have it's drawbacks

• Issues/queries etc are resolved a lot faster and with less frustration when face to face (and a whiteboard).
• Similarly, understanding what the rest of the team is doing, and helping the rest of the team and collaborating is a lot easier when you are together.
• Likewise, the social aspects of working and just being part of a team are essential.

In the ideal world, I would work from home maybe 1-2 days per week (when I know the tasks I am working on shouldn't require much interaction with other people and nobody urgently needs me etc).

Atomic Pineapple

I highly doubt it will become widespread to the extent that it will impact wages or job opportunities. Organisations are well aware of what they lose when they go fully remote. Smaller more adaptive organisations could do it, but larger ones will see too much of a productivity drop.

Personally, I enjoyed the flexibility to go into the office when I needed to and work from home when I could. 100% working has not been an enjoyable experience.

14ned

Atomic Pineapple wrote: »

I highly doubt it will become widespread to the extent that it will impact wages or job opportunities. Organisations are well aware of what they lose when they go fully remote. Smaller more adaptive organisations could do it, but larger ones will see too much of a productivity drop.

I don't think it's down to org size, rather whether it suits well the product or service in question. I used to contract for Verizon Dublin, their entire org always worked remotely. I have colleagues in Siemens whose entire org is always fully remote. Most devs working in high end audio for any size of org tend to work remotely, it's the culture in audio.

Working fully remote tends to suit more mature products or services, especially those mainly on sustaining - the only ideas you need to spark are how to fix bugs without breaking anything, and being fully remote doesn't impede clearing JIRA backlog at all. It also suits devops or anything about maintaining uptime on remote servers where long term planning, but also rapid response, are key.

At the extreme other end, building out blue sky software, the really innovative stuff, with exclusively very senior devs suits fully remote nicely. They don't need managing, they don't need to train each other, or explain anything to the others. I suspect this is why the high end audio folk tend to all be remote, it's a niche skill domain everybody working there understands deeply.

Really it's the middle ground of software, the stuff still having features added to it, the stuff where you see a lot of staff churn and you need to constantly train in people to take over from departing staff, that's the kind of software development which suits on-site. But note that that doesn't have anything to do with the software development process itself really. Open source proves you can develop big, feature heavy, valuable software with lots of remote workers. Rather, it's the business need to create easy substitutability of workers which makes onsite desirable for business process.

I've heard recently a lot of mention that you can't bounce ideas off your colleagues, or brainstorm over Zoom. True, you can't over zoom. The way we do it is to write well written well argued long form email. That's how you pitch an idea for the Linux kernel: persuade a critical mass on the kernel dev mailing list of its value, write the thing, nurse it through multiple rounds of peer review, get it merged.

There is a ton of great ideas, very innovative ideas, perfectly possible via email. It's just a very different process - slower, much more asynchronous, more more reliant on writing persuasive English prose. But I'd warrant that from inception to final production shipping the time is about the same. Just much more goes on the early "pitch and refine the proposal" stage, which tends to save a bunch of time in the testing and refinement phase especially. So it all evens out, in my experience.

Niall

stevek93

I'd rather have the option to work from home, I hate being in an open office I am always picking up some bug. I see Germany wants to make it a legal right to do so.

Atomic Pineapple

14ned wrote: »

...

True, everything depends on context, I was generalising. Referring to the need for organisations to exercise control over their employees. Many large organisations simply won't trust large swathes of their employees working from home long term, despite the messages of "health and wellbeing" they espouse.

The metaphor of the machine being an overused lens applied to organisational life. Many "leaders" will want their cogs back where they can see them. The software development process itself, is simple, running an organisation full of people with different perspectives, and goals, is where things get messy.

You can also be innovative over Zoom, it is just a different medium that enhances some communication aspects at the expense of others. The issue is that it takes very skilled people to be able to do this. The same with email, though everyone's vast experience of email as a medium helps less skillful people utilise it for ideas.

GreeBo

Remote working for developers is great, when you already know them, what they are capable of and how dedicated, dilligent, etc they are.

Hiring an unknown and having them work 100% remotely doesnt typically work out too well.

GreeBo

The other side of the coin is that when everyone is working remotely, its much easier to compare people fairly.
You just look at their output, there are no water cooler conversations or chats at the bar to give preference to one over another.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

I've only ever had two remote jobs but they were both different in one crucial way

The first was a mobile dev shop where you were always on different projects. I think this worked well as a lot of stuff was one person projects where you were given the brief and work away.

The current remote job is for one application and I'm on the mobile side but you need to talk to backend/frontend people for new features. It's pretty hard to get all the info I need without seeing people face to face. I feel like I'm bugging people asking questions on Slack or whatever but that's probably my issue. I prefer just combing through JIRA issues, source code and Google Sheets to find the info I need. The Zoom meetings are handy then just to dump all the info you accrued and see if there's anything wrong. It's working out alright but I can definitely see the limitations of remote work

jester77

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup wrote: »

I've only ever had two remote jobs but they were both different in one crucial way

The first was a mobile dev shop where you were always on different projects. I think this worked well as a lot of stuff was one person projects where you were given the brief and work away.

The current remote job is for one application and I'm on the mobile side but you need to talk to backend/frontend people for new features. It's pretty hard to get all the info I need without seeing people face to face. I feel like I'm bugging people asking questions on Slack or whatever but that's probably my issue. I prefer just combing through JIRA issues, source code and Google Sheets to find the info I need. The Zoom meetings are handy then just to dump all the info you accrued and see if there's anything wrong. It's working out alright but I can definitely see the limitations of remote work

That just sounds like poor planning. I work in a similar situation and don't have those issues. Each project has its own slack channel and JIRA board. We would have a kickoff meeting, PO explains what we are building, BE in Portugal creates the graphlQL calls, I have access to his dev sandbox and can make calls to it and we talk through slack. Daily standups and weekly meeting to monitor progress. My QA sits in Moldova, and I fire off a build on Jenkins from my branch and she has the apk for testing within a few mins. Runs smoothly.

CalamariFritti

We have a pretty flexible wfh policy already. Its mostly people with longer commutes who use it a lot. I have a reasonable commute and I use it when its convenient (handyman, deliveries). Now we're all wfh since mid March.

After nearly 2 months of it I'm still not liking it all that much but it has grown on me. I wouldn't want to do it all the time but will probably do more often in the future (after THIS).

Not being a regular wfh guy up to this I'm struggling to separate work and home properly. I could be doing an hour or two at any hour of the day/night or any day of the week. Just cos I'm bored. No shortage of work for me atm. Which is handy in one way. You can tick off an hour or two when you actually feel like working. But you're also half at work all the time which couldn't be good in the long run.

Maybe that has something to do with the current situation though. Maybe I'd find it easier to 'switch off' under normal circumstances when you could actually go and do other things outside the house or go out for the evening.

In the long run I could see us leaning towards wfh even more after this. People might find it convenient to organise their lives with it with regards to school runs etc.

antimatterx

Speaking of WFH, what monitors are you guys doing?

Would this monitor be any good? I'm literally just going to use it for coding/having other websites such as Jira/Github and Invision open.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B07JP9QJ15/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_2?smid=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE&psc=1

I'm using a 13" MBP and with offices workers being told to WFH until August 10th, I need some more screen real estate.

Idleater

I bought a 4k Asus the week before the lock in kicked in and it works nicely with my 2015 MacBook pro and MS surface (both are Mini Displayport).

Edited to add:
Reason I say above is because it was significantly 25+% cheaper and higher resolution than that Dell if you want to have retina support.

antimatterx

Idleater wrote: »

I bought a 4k Asus the week before the lock in kicked in and it works nicely with my 2015 MacBook pro and MS surface (both are Mini Displayport).

Edited to add:
Reason I say above is because it was significantly 25+% cheaper and higher resolution than that Dell if you want to have retina support.

Ooh interesting. Would you happen to have a link to the model you bought.

Idleater

antimatterx wrote: »

Ooh interesting. Would you happen to have a link to the model you bought.

I got a vp28 like the link below but a height adjustable stand.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/ASUS-VP28UQG-Display-Adaptive-FreeSync/dp/B075CQ5Z8R

My reasoning was get a reasonable monitor that can be used as a second monitor if something better (value or specification) crops up. I got it from a local company because I didn't know what Amazon delivery would be like in the following week (grand as it turned out but hey)


Edit: vp28uqgl
https://www.amazon.com/Asus-VP28UQGL-Monitor-FreeSync-DisplayPort/dp/B07YP6ML2D

Edit 2 (on the WFH topic): I have to say I am lucky in that I have not been impacted work wise, I'm as busy as before. I used to occasionally work from home, 3-4 times a month and was reasonably set up for it. The transition was worse for colleague doing it for the first time but we seem to be functioning BAU so to speak. Apart from the obvious virus concerns, I see myself availing of working from home a lot more - after - whatever or whenever that is.

jester77

I upgraded from 2 X Dell 27 inches to a 34 inch ultra wide LG 34wn80c-b. Should be arriving this week, curious to see how it handles.

circadian

Worked in IBM a few years ago, Wednesday and Friday were wfh days. I liked it because it saved me cycling 30km a day to Damastown and back. Current job has flexible wfh but only 1 day a week. I expect this to change and people were allowed to work from home indefinitely since the end of January.

If I was doing this with the kids in creche I wouldn't mind, I've always been productive at home since I can fire up the PC for a quick game on a break and other home comforts.

scriba

I have been wfh since end of last year. I'm fifty miles from the office, I had a baby on the way, and my entire team are US based so there was no-one looking for me locally anyway. I'm used to it, and it's really handy to be able to avoid the commute. Downside is the temptation to do late hours and extra work when the pressure is on coming up to a release though, I definitely feel like I'm always connected, though having the rest of the team on east coast time contributes to this. All in all, though, with a young family, and in my current set up, I'd happily stay working remotely when/if things go back to normal.

MyPeopleDrankTheSoup

jester77 wrote: »

That just sounds like poor planning. I work in a similar situation and don't have those issues. Each project has its own slack channel and JIRA board. We would have a kickoff meeting, PO explains what we are building, BE in Portugal creates the graphlQL calls, I have access to his dev sandbox and can make calls to it and we talk through slack. Daily standups and weekly meeting to monitor progress. My QA sits in Moldova, and I fire off a build on Jenkins from my branch and she has the apk for testing within a few mins. Runs smoothly.

yes 100% it was poor planning, my manager was apologising and telling me as much. but only me and a few others are remote. some of them are still travelling into the office and someone in the office got the info we needed from the other teams and finished my issue! i was just kinda annoyed as I felt that job was mine alone but that's me being stupid.

the point of it all is I feel I missed out on important info that you only really get when in the office. in a perfect world, everything is planned out to perfection and all information is documentated but of course we know it doesn't work like that.