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by vkgfx 1174 days ago
I've been WFH since around 2017 or so. After a while, it starts to feel like I ship code into the void. Like I'm a freelancer who happens to be working for a company rather than an employee. This gets even worse after a round or two of layoffs and/or reorgs and being on teams with people I've never met.

I had to visit our office (first time since Jan 2020) to do some emergency heads down work with my teammates and it's incredible how I had forgotten what it feels like to be part of a company.

With that combined with the fact that people are increasingly bad at hiding the fact that they're often just taking off mid-afternoon (always fun to need a set of eyes for a critical hotfix pull request and get radio silence on Teams!), the difficulty of focusing at home, and the expense of trying to live somewhere with an extra bedroom or area as a dedicated home office, and I really wish I could go back to the office. Unfortunately I don't live in the same state as the office anymore, so I am stuck like this for now.
2 comments
FpUser 1174 days ago
>"After a while, it starts to feel like I ship code into the void"

It depends on what's your role. I am responsible for product design and development. I definitely do not feel like my part of code is shipped "into the void". I see it working and serving customers

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re-thc 1174 days ago
The failure isn't on you nor the need for an office. It's on the company for not creating the culture. Online communities e.g. in gaming have always been vibrant. It didn't always require in-person meetups to make it work.
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RestlessMind 1174 days ago
Company culture is set after it grows beyond a certain size. And it is very hard to change it. So why should company change it if it can continue in the same old way?

And if you think companies should change their cultures to find good talent, let me assure you - companies know that and track attrition carefully. If they didn't think they had an upper hand in forcing RTO, they wouldn't have done that. It is much easier to find workers who can come to the office than what HN seem to believe.

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re-thc 1174 days ago
> If they didn't think they had an upper hand in forcing RTO, they wouldn't have done that.

And 640k ought to be enough for everybody too right?

> So why should company change it if it can continue in the same old way?

Yeah like why should the world improve if we can continue the same way? Why move to electricity if there's fossil fuel. Why do anything?

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