Clojurians Log v2

👋

Morning

måning¡

I might be controversial in my predictions but I think after the pandemic ends there will be backlash against working remotely. My guess is that the intersection of people that can and want to move outside a city to have spacious well-equipped home office isn’t that big. Todays tools are still vastly inadequate and I still haven’t seen anyone doing remote well (been in three companies since the pandemic started). People will start treating offices as a benefit, remote-first will stay a rare thing, not much popular than before. In ~20 years Covid will be as important factor as Spanish flu. Or maybe it is just me - I miss the office, I miss my old commute - 20-40 min on a bicycle.

mogge

Morn'

Morning

Good morning

@dev964 I think this is really hard to tell to be honest, I think that more will be remote, but it's going to be hard to tell what the general sentiment will be. We know there's going to be some pushback, while at the same time a lot of offices are giving up their leases, how big each side is? No idea 😃...

TBH i am hoping for and reckon there will be a reasonable midpoint. I want to be able to meet up and work with colleagues periodically, which means the company having an office. But I wouldn't want to move to London. I know some of the folk in London would like to get back to the office, as a much nicer 'work environment', but I'll be happy with mostly remote and one or two days a fortnight staying down in London to see people in-person

I'm hopeful there will be a middle-ground too. Work from home, come in every so often.

Periodic meet ups can be done at venues other than an office (conference centres... or in the pub 😂)

☝️

A fortnightly meal is a winner imo!

As much as I like pubs they’re not a friendly environment for everyone

in my previous gig a few people were in Europe, some others in Bristol, increasingly less in London. Even though I lived 20 minutes from the office I didn't like going there, but enjoyed working for a week from the office when everyone else would come over to London every couple of months.

I liked going to St Mary Aldermary in the City with everyone and spending the afternoon having coffees and cake.

I now work 5 years full-remote and before I did for many years in the office. It’s better but also I miss informal chats, after work beers, reading books in the tram. But overall, I think I will not come back. Also, at current stage, hiring in Oxford would be probably kind of limiting. I don’t know how many Clojure devs are here.

You're more likely to find Haskell developers in Oxford, I guess

(At least, when I studied there, the first programming course was FP in Haskell; but then after some OCaml and Oberon, it was all Java)

Yep, lots of haskellers, joined in their meetups a few times, friendly group 😃

I miss this place too 😞

@seancorfield What would you perceive as the downsides to a 100% remote company?

@glfinn83 Probably the biggest downside is the lack of actual socialization with colleagues and so there's less of the "watercooler" / coffee / break room chats.

We used to have an all-hands get together once a year but as folks have moved around a bit, that's harder to do now. Our HR person moved back to be with family in Romania (I didn't realize for nearly three months, until she shared a photo she took on her morning bike ride in our healthy-selfies Slack channel!). A couple of folks moved from So. Cal. to Las Vegas (not really much of a change) and our lead member services person moved from So. Cal. to Spain (near Barcelona).

Our UI/UX designer moves between Tehran, Istanbul, Paris, and Stockholm (we're trying to get him settled in Sweden -- now that we've had to give up on getting him into the USA, because of the difficulties the previous administration caused with the visa process!).

The product/IT side of the house is split between Seattle, Northern Washington state (a little town called Bellingham), Bay Area (me), Minneapolis, and Boston -- with one person in each location!

I've been remote for about 5 years now. I feel like my productivity has definitely decline in those 5 years.

But one of the reasons might also be that I've lost interest in the product itself

My productivity goes up and down but, in general, I consider myself to be very productive (and work seems to think so, which is the important part!). I have a two-hour blocked scheduled each day for "focus" time: no email, no chat, no browsing -- just working on tickets -- and that helps a lot. Microsoft Outlook 365 has that feature built-in, and it plans your "focus" time up to two weeks in advance, so I take advantage of that!

We have 365, I might look into that. It would definitely help with the cold calls I get almost every dayy

If I do get bored/frustrated with what I'm doing at work, I take a half day break to work on OSS projects -- and work is fine with me doing that.

(since we happen to use nearly all of my OSS projects at work already 🙂 )

That's a sign of a good quality workplace

It's a great place to work! It's why I've stayed for a decade (longest I've ever worked for a single company).

Prior to that, six years at Macromedia which I also loved (and then Adobe bought us 😞 )

Macromedia, that must have been an interesting place to work at. A lot of innovation going on there back in the day

Yeah, I was the lead architect for all IT projects for nearly all of my time there. So I got to design and oversee migration of all e-commerce to a hub'n'spoke message queue across all departments, the rebuilding of the http://macromedia.com website, the migration to Oracle ERP (oh joy!). And then I got to spend a summer working on the Flash Player team, on the compiler test suite for ActionScript (since I have a compiler/test suite background from decades ago).

Each of those main projects were about two years duration each, and then I was involved with pretty much any project that crossed department boundaries -- including the Flash-based "community/help module" that popped up in various Studio products, since that sourced all of its data from the "web technology group" (my primary team).

I loved that Macromedia mostly operated on the principle that it is OK to take a risk and fail (and ask forgiveness after the fact) -- as opposed to Adobe which was so freakin' consensus-based that I spent most of my time in meetings with ever-larger numbers of people 🤯

Yeah, that's the entrepreneurial spirit that is being actively suppressed at my workplace, even though that it would be ideal for our product team