Who else here is now forced work from home?

Teleworking does work, as long is in office / site.
Tele-homeworking is not something that works for long run.
Most people need be controlled over.
When they feel a bit of freedom, like being at home for example, they will start slacking and looking for distractions.
Hence productivity drops.

 

Damn, simmer down Loki.

 

@JamesArndt you speaking from perspective of highly skilled, carefully selected group of people, of which probably large group are contractors. That will be of course skewed and subjective view, toward what you saying. And you may be right, these people, like yourself are effective in what and where they doing. But these people present only small fraction, of global workforce. Not to mention, not everyone like their own work.

I personally prefer 'freedom' of space, but I know, I wouldn't like stay 100% time at home, working remotely. It would become boring eventually, loosing opportunities of career dev., and whats more. I love be on the road, when I can.

People tendency is to take advantage, whenever they can.
Specially obvious in countries, where social is on large skale.
If motivation is more work = more money, sure it will work.
When money is constant regardless of done work, people will notice it.

If you would go outside high skilled professionals, passionate, or self employed groups, you would realize how it is. Crazy stuff happens when no ones watches. I worked with many in past. Don't get me wrong, some are very dedicated, to what they doing.

While I know range of great engineers personally, form range of fields, I also know range of people, which will do everything, to stay at home and take benefits. And unfortunately size of that second community is far far greater, than high skilled professionals.

While certainly there are benefits of work at office, despite all above, there is also massive psychological aspect. For example isolating people at home from other work personel. It is not healthy approach in long run.

And btw, just to be clear, I am not talking about 1-2 days at home, but full time.

 

"Only true geniuses can self regulate" and "people will always take advantage when they can" are both ridiculous and ignore the material conditions that lead to both those situations, material conditions that are rapidly shifting.

 

Little late to the drive-in discussion - we have one where I live here in Ohio. They officially suspended their season due to virus until further notice. I was looking forward to their opening in a couple of weeks

 

Been working from home for a few weeks now. I admit that I miss my coworkers.

 

I certainly hope for recovery to a degree of normality (for all the obvious reasons, and) because I am huge fan of the movie theater experience (and regular theater) and they are just about to open a brand new AMC a few blocks from me with all the bells and whistles.

 

We may have a dispute about group taken into view and following results.
But we didn't specified prior any of group. We pointed about "work from home". Not "work from home for highly skilled professionals". Which changes group sample by far.
Further on, you explained about assumed specified grup. Which is fine.
I took look at overall as I could, in brief discussion. Not only IT and engineers, but not exclusively. That is why perspective of my view and experience from various of industry on the matter, differs from yours.

I am actually happy where I am and thats what matter for me.
With all respect, but assuming not knowing anything about person and stating, is plain wrong.

 

Folks, please, let's keep tone down the arguing. We all have different experiences.

 

I thought we just discussing (maybe a bit aloud). I am not upset at @JamesArndt, just to be clear. But ok, I will drop the subject, just in case to not upset anyone else.
Apology for noise

 

Far from it, we are well connected online and work as normal.

I just like my coworkers and miss spending time with them.

 

Well the best thing to do is be apolitical and think about humans surviving. That's what I do. I don't care about country nor creed or blame.

This thread's about working from home and making the best of that situation. Sadly a lot of people like me probably spent too much time at home or on computers so our lives do not change much.

Perhaps we can leave insights for others like using this time to not go on social media too much. It's a mind killer. That's my tip. Instead encourage kids to get into that time consuming thing called game development. Or take time to try out VR, as a family wide exercise. Alyx is here. Try it!

I once said a thing about VR and that was "It's like a holiday..." and you know it can be. So there's my tips. Try something new. Keep active. Stay away from social media.

Good luck, be well.

 

I was fortunate when I started working from home, The team I joined had been doing it for several years and were extremely supportive and full of tips.

Everyone is different, and has a different situation, but the biggest insight that helped me was to have a designated work area, and don't do "not work" there. Social media, random surfing, etc, I don't do any of that in my work area. Even the forums are not logged in on my work computer. If I am not in a creative mood or just not feeling like working, I move away from workstation. Very quickly it created a nice separation early on.

 

I seem to lose the ability to remember names quickly from not exercising the social interaction functions of the brain. But I can remember all the calls from the physics API..so it ain't early onset Alzheimers..

 

Physical connection is important, and the more people turn to purely online connection, the worse off we will be. Everyone is an individual, of course, so if pure digital communication works for you then by all means use it, but humans as a whole need physical touch.

"Interpersonal touch has important social and affective values. Specifically, skin-to-skin touch contributes to the development of premature infants, regulates their stress responses, provides comfort and emotional well-being and has an analgesic effect34. Physiologically, interpersonal touch increases the coupling of electrodermal activity and pulse rate variability and modulates blood pressure reactivity to stress as well as reactivity to distress." - source

Also, this article with references. Also many others, but it's breakfast time so I'm off.

 

Yea... so... living (stupidly) in the heart of SV, I have silly small apartment. My "workspace" is literally just a separate desk, next to my art desk in my kitchen/dining room. My work workspace is pretty much just turning around to a different monitor/keyboard setup.

Several of my friends have full work offices, others none at all. I need to have some separation. One of my friends just uses his couch, but he is more disciplined. My producer had a seperate office, then he had a baby, so he moved to the local coffee shop. Then the virus, so now he just shares with his daughter. (which is actually pretty adorable during meetings, she is just old enough to fascinated by the faces on the screen and giggles and points.)

--

I actually have been "missing" my coworkers as well. Being fully remote, we normally spend a week together at an onsite once a quarter. Usually Stockholm, but also other parts of Sweden and the Netherlands. Our primary contract/publisher recently changed to one in London, so we were supposed to have an onsite there, but it got delayed for a few months because of uncertainty with Brexit, and now cancelled until further notice. Usually we see each other IRL every three months, but our last trip was last Oct.

 

In most work places touching is probably not something common, or may be even perceived in wrong way.
However, close person-person contact, facial expressions, shaking hand and even slapping in the back in positive way, is fairly common and can be highly motivating. Also, as already mentioned, it is instant information conveying, which is very important in many type of business.

 

There are also chemicals that transfer between people in physical spaces. It's not just about actual touch. Being in the same space with someone else is what we need as humans. Even when it comes to the simple sharing of germs by being close to one another, we build up immunity. Without that closeness we don't get the diversity of bacteria, and we won't thrive. There is no real comparison between online and offline where it balances out. The further down the road we go towards eschewing physical contact, the worse it will be for human kind.

I'm all for working at home, but I'm not a fan of the modern day "I don't need to be in physical proximity to anyone, so I'll just isolate myself" idea. I'm sort of a combo tech-nerd-Luddite, I suppose. If someone is a true anthropophobic, sure, but I don't think that's as common as the internet makes it out to be. Social media would certainly like to change that, though.

I'm ranting, I know. And possibly off topic, but it is about "missing working with other people around", and not really about giving someone an inappropriate hug at the office.

 

The need for human connection (and physical proximity) is well documented scientifically.

Some people prefer more frequency than others, and that is something human-minded managers have to account for.

 

Many things. We live all over the world, so I literally had never met any of the people I worked with. It was 3 months before I did. Meeting them in meat space completely changes your perception. Even with regular (4-5 days a week) meetings via VC, we only talk as a group, and it is work related and not ideal, given the globe nature of our reality, I am frequently chating with our engineers, as they are at the end of the day, I have just woken up. And often people are curt and/or formal on VC, relationships are very different once you recognize other are real humans. (both hippo and angrypenguin sound wayyyy different IRL than in my head).

But more importantly is what we refer to as Social Capital. We are a small indie(ish) studio, there is a certain commaradire that you get working with others in a office, that we don't with others on a screen. We are passionate and in this all together and meeting those folks massively increased that bond and passion. When we onsite, we all stay together in the same hotel far from home and spend 5-6 full days together. Meals, pubs, touristy things, pubs, walks, pubs, shopping and pubs.

Being we are all about the same age, big geeks and even the least experienced of us has been a professional in the industry for well over decade (much more in some cases, its fun when you discover that your coworkers have worked on many of your favorite games ever), we unsurprisingly have a ton of things incommon, (except native language). Board games are huge part as well, we spend nearly as much time working as playing board games at on onsites. (our last trip, we were on an island in Sweden in a converted ancient church and military base, drinking and playing obscure board/card games while sun set over the ocean... it was kinda epic)

But even on the work side, we tend to use the entire onsite for planning and design meetings. A few hours in group with a white board is easily 10x more productive than a email chain, or VC.

I am not a very social person most of the time, but when I am, I am bit of extrovert. The feast/famine set up of remote work is perfection for me. I get the flexibility of working on my own most of the time, then get a huge burst of "other people" all at once. Plus board games over VC suck... not so much in a board game cafe/pub in Stockholm.

 

I'm actually finding lately that I'm more productive on my couch with my laptop than I am in my office with my dual-screen desktop and a purpose-built work environment.

I think it's because when I'm in there my time is divided between different work which competes for attention, where on my laptop there is only one project.

Is this normal for this to be a thing people are formally taught? Maybe I was taught it so long ago I just don't remember it. I guess if Lockheed is a multicultural workplace it makes sense, though, as social etiquette about these things varies from culture to culture.

In any case, the point isn't that you need to physically go around touching your workmates. It's that bonds form when you spend time in physical promximity to people, and that the occasional physical touch - handshakes when you meet people, high-fives in moments of celebration, clinking glasses together over a drink - helps to consolidate that bond. I also suspect that making deliberate, physical contact helps get the important relationships to fit within your Dunbar's Number. (Whether or not Dunbar's Number is valid, we've certainly only got enough time / effort to maintain a finite number of relationships in our lives.)

 

Heh... I missed this. Are those "zones" parts of the body, or locations in the office?

 

I'm a bit similar. I prefer to work without others around (preferably at all), but when I am doing something social I do not want anything to do with the internet.

I work from home, and I usually feel the need to go out and about in the afternoon/night. With everything pretty much shutting down around here after midday now (Australia) a good bit of social/physical proximity is going to be harder to come by.

Sounds like some kind of 1984 sex ed class. I don't know where these sorts of ideas come from in this day and age. Reducing human contact to a number of spatial zones with associated risk values sounds like some kind of early-alpha android OS implementation.

 

I am very sorry to hear this sir, I hope it will end soon but it could be many months. I wish you a speedy recovery.

 

You mean there are real people outside of these walls?

 

You haven't seen my browser tabs at work...

Most workers aren't that productive in the office either. In fact there is a tendency for a lot of busy work in the office to make people look important. I'm fully convinced that most of the staff in my office could get their jobs done in four hours and go home if the culture just stopped rewarding hours at work and started rewarding work done. Plus losing the commute would be great.

A lot of it comes from just general physical proximity. If you are near someone, you are more likely to chat idly with them. Idle chat tends to strengthen relationships. And it tends to occasionally produce random ideas and collaborations.

My industry isn't programming, so its probably different. But a lot of my work arises from just overhearing what's going on in the office. People complain about an issue, so I fix it. Its much harder to produce this type of laissez faire collaboration in an online environment. But I can see this being significantly less important in a less people focused industry.

 

Lots of people are in a similar situation. That doesn't make it suck any less, but hopefully it means that the setback isn't so big comparatively speaking.

My advice there would be to make sure you use this time wisely. Don't sit on your laurels, make sure you use the extra time it gets you to increase your value for when things start to pick up again.

 

how you know it screwed your future up when it hasn't even happened yet.

 

I think now is a good time to take advantage of Unity's gift of free access to Premium learning materials.

 

People are capable of analyzing their own material conditions and they context they exist under.

 

Have you tried applying for any jobs as a junior developer rather than as an intern? I'm not that familiar with internship laws even for my own area but it wouldn't surprise me if the negatives outweighed the positives for the companies you're applied for and they would much rather have a junior developer.

 

some people always be acting a fool

 

Don't sign your posts.

 

As a rule I believe this to be wildly untrue. Taking action and operating on honest trial and error is the only real way to combat the mind's tendency to analyze everything toward a negative conclusion.

 

Most people who have to analyze their material conditions and context in the first place are doing so because they can not afford to do otherwise.

 

That doesn't mean the outcome of the analysis is useful. Taking action and monitoring its effect is always better, because the world doesn't lie as easily as one can to oneself.

 

Okay, let's use an example.

It's the middle of a global pandemic. In January, a person's disability support was cut off, meaning that their income has dropped to effectively zero because their only supplementary income was contract work doing hiring and data analysis. This work was rare enough before the economic realities of the pandemic set in. The nature of their disability means that they are unable to function in a traditional workplace. They do not have family or people they know locally to rely on for financial support.

To add to this, the pandemic has shut down a lot of key government services, including severe delays to the appeals process and the emergency funding extension process. On April 1st, they will be receiving their final payment. Their bank balance is enough that they can pay rent for one month after that and no more.

Tell me, what trial and error process can this person afford to take?