A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely

https://dtransposed.github.io/blog/2023/11/02/Remote-SWE/

by dtransposed • 3 years ago

189 140 3 years ago

dtransposed.github.io

yieldcrv• 3 years ago

skimmed the article, yeah dedicated time is nice. my hybrid and onsite jobs do suffer from incessant context switching which is more of a management problem.

on the "video game" aspect, I have noticed that it seems my generation has created (or at least embraced) a world much more akin to the video games we grew up with. I really like that.

Between gig work and waypoints on a map, its like all those open world video games

One time at Burning Man it really felt like Second Life, a game that I don't consider my generation and Burning Man crowd itself skews older

I like this direction of things

smith7018• 3 years ago

One time at Burning Man it really felt like Second Life, a game that I don't consider my generation and Burning Man crowd itself skews older

Man, that acid must've hit great

FirmwareBurner5• 3 years ago

A Video Game that Pays

Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun, not because I made any money from them.

While the job or workplace, for the vast majority of people on this earth, including those in SW development, is mostly an activity done out of necessity of not being homeless and not starving, usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun.

It's nice when your job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun.

For example, I went into coding because I liked it as an activity, but almost non of my workplaces had any tasks on the kanban board that I would ever consider fun, nor did I consider the whole Agile/scrum thing fun or the managemnt styles I was subjected to as part of the KPIs, but I stayed in the industry because it pays the bills not because it was very fun.

narinxas• 3 years ago

I had a work colleage who played games BECAUSE he made money from them...

essentially some dumb kid from a real wealthy part of the world would pay my former colleague "peanuts" to upgrade their player and gather other stats.

FirmwareBurner5• 3 years ago

Sure. There are a lot of opportunities in the developing world to remotely extract wealth (legally or otherwise) from the wealthiest part of the world in exchange for services at starvation wages there, thar are well above minimum wages at home.

Levelling up the MMORPG characters of rich western kids in exchange for money is one of them, and telling them to "try turning it off and on again" when they're adults is another.

keiferski2• 3 years ago

I spent most of my teenage years playing the “economy” of EverQuest Online Adventures, mostly by collecting rare items and selling them. I don’t think I ever reached the maximum character level, even after playing the game for half a decade.

It’s a shame I couldn’t cash all that digital money into real money, but I guess I did enjoy it anyway. I have the impression that people do similar things in games like Eve Online.

gbalduzzi• 3 years ago

The article does explain the comparison, and it doesn't mean that it's fun.

These are the actual comparisons:

You interact with people from all corners of the world.
You complete tasks on different online platforms (Slack, GitHub, VS Code, Google Docs, etc.).
You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!)
There are also side-quests to take care of (“Hey Damian, could you take a look at this bug?”).
Sometimes you can gang up with your teammates to slay a big beast (“Hey, I have this nasty bug that I have been working on for the past few days. I know you have better knowledge of this particular part of the repository, could we jump on a pair programming session?”).
And you get to level up once in a while!

TeMPOraL• 3 years ago

> You have a list of your main quests to complete (you can find them in your journ… Kanban board!)

Wish I've been to a place that gave you only one quest journal. The fewest distinct quest journals I ever got to is four: the mailbox, the blessed Jira/Gitlab Issues/Kanban/Trello/whatever board, the personal list of things to be done that don't belong anywhere else, and the TODO/FIXME comments in the codebase.

That's a minimum. In one places I had like 4 distinct issue boards in active use.

Point being, there's one other major thing other than fun, that games have and work doesn't: videogame UX doesn't suck, and wants to help you do your quests.

simplify• 3 years ago

I find the game analogy silly. Of course reality is "like" a game – games are inspired by and modeled after reality, after all!

If you flip it around to say "games are like working at a remote job", then the flaw becomes obvious. A remote job is not like playing all games – only the ones with activities that mirror what we already do in real life. Which is, ultimately, not a very interesting statement.

mym19903• 3 years ago

These are all things that we were doing in person as well...is in person work not a video game that pays then?

tapland• 3 years ago

Implying video games are fun.

Jokes aside, video games are first and foremost things I want to spend time with, which is the opposite of most jobs. Catchy title but yeah =/

xwdv• 3 years ago

It is a privilege to only have to play video games for fun.

In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by.

titanomachy2• 3 years ago

Doesn’t that pay less than minimum wage?

FirmwareBurner5• 3 years ago

In college, I played World of Warcraft just to farm gold, just to get by.

Is that also not a privilege? In most developing countries people have to do much more body or mind crushing activities to support themselves.

Supermancho3• 3 years ago

Errr..no. I only played video games because they were fun

What is a game? I would say that a game is an abstract system used to understand our reality (or experiences in life), via a series of interactive actions that alter the system. Generally there is a set of goals (usually just to "win").

I develop software because it's a game. I do watch a lot of progress bars. Aside from that, it's one of my favorite games (to my wife's chagrin). It's fun for me and I'm not the only one. Why does it matter that other people don't enjoy what they do?

Nav_Panel• 3 years ago

Agreed 100%. A courtroom trial is also a sort of game, but it's not typically fun for those involved. Much the opposite...

digging• 3 years ago

That's not a bad or incorrect definition of game but it's... also not what people mean when they say "video game" or something like like a video game. The specific language in the article makes it clear that the person is referring to (basically) fantasy MMORPGs.

mym19903• 3 years ago

This seems like an extremely over complicated way of defining a game. If I play chess, or a video game, or tennis, I am not doing those things to 'understand my reality'. I am doing them because it is usually fun and gives me some kind of dopamine(ymmv), you might even say I play games to get away from reality. Some people use games to learn, some use them to accomplish an otherwise mundane task. Some people split games into 'finite and infinite' but typically they are a form of play, governed by a set of rules, that lead to some outcome. Games can be zero sum, or not.

gryn3• 3 years ago

yes, technically well kinda, but not the most common definition of it.

when defining something it's also pertinent to ask yourself what isn't included in that set.

what isn't a game in this case ? almost any dynamical system would kinda fit your definition. including turing machines.

to go the absurd length. If I identify as a vegetarian but mostly eat meat then what is that word even supposed to mean ?

words value in communication come from their discriminatory nature helping the listener filter the state of possible valid answers to smaller subset that what they started with. the more a word is stretched to includes the closer it comes to becoming a filler expression.

light_hue_1• 3 years ago

usually picked on the basis of the highest compensation because that's what pays the bills, not out of which is most fun.

I think you should reconsider some of your life choices then.

You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun?

job and tasks at work also happen to be an activity that's fun to you but that's super rare, and it's best not to spend your life searching for that magic workplace where that could happen, but simply to learn to separate and containerize work and fun.

This is some of the worst advice I've ever seen. Those workplaces are not rare at all!

So instead of spending your life at a fun job your advice is for people to spend their life at a job they don't like? Jeez. That sounds like a life worth living for sure.

timeagain• 3 years ago

I’m sure they bring this mentality to work and make it miserable for everyone else too

ferbivore• 3 years ago

Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun?

Most people I know never had a real choice, and those who did had to exercise it around the age of 18, with no real insight into what they were getting into.

Those workplaces are not rare at all!

What makes you think that?

s-lambert• 3 years ago

You're spending a large part of your life working. Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun?

I've picked two jobs that I thought could be fun but both of them ended up being the same tedium as the non-fun jobs. How do you pick a fun job?

nofunthrow93822• 3 years ago

Why wouldn't you choose a job that's fun?

Unfortunately, nothing is fun (for me) when done 8 hours a day, 5 days a week for months or years.

Not to say there aren't better or worse jobs, of course. But there isn't anything (including any of my favourite hobbies) I would spend that much time doing, if I didn't need to earn money.

zug_zug• 3 years ago

So I like considering the parallel of work as a videogame, but personally the way author implies that tickets are the work doesn't align with my experience.

In my experience the dealing with managers is inevitably more than half the work (just trying to work around all the churn and uncertainty of the company).

NOTE: Shenzen IO is a video-game that lightly emulates a remote job as a hardware designer.

xnorswap2• 3 years ago

I love Shenzhen I/O, it's perhaps my all-time favourite video game despite having left it uncompleted, in part precisely because it started to feel like hard work.

But you're right that what makes it a fun video game is that the problems are:

- Clearly defined - Well specified - Solvable - Known to be Solvable - Prioritised - Unchanging - Feedback is provided - Contains closure

None of those things applies to real-life, where problems are under-defined, under-specified, sometimes aren't even known whether they have a solution, and are subject to the whims and changing desires of product management.

And even if you navigate all of that and produce a solution, you often get little feedback, or indeed sometimes never get any closure at all. Sometimes the project gets sidelined and it never goes live or it goes live and you don't know if a single customer even interacted with it.

You have to learn to deal with all of that, which can be harder than the actual programming.

FFP9995• 3 years ago

All we have to do now is interrupt your game several times a day so you can sit in a room and watch an NPC read every word on every slide on a Powerpoint presentation, or listen to several of them make decisions about a subject they know nothing about.

Waterluvian2• 3 years ago

Ugh. Those bad early days of WoW where every quest description had to slowly appear on the screen.

FFP9995• 3 years ago

That's one thing that drives me crazy, the occasional game I see where you can't accelerate the text at all, it just dribbles out onto the screen at the pace of the slowest reader imaginable.

monlockandkey• 3 years ago

This is the 1hr long unskippable cutscene...

FFP9995• 3 years ago

And for some reason if I get up and leave to get a drink of water or use the bathroom, _I'm_ the asshole.

gumballindie• 3 years ago

commute has decreased by 2 hours daily.

That's 10 hours a week saved. Basically, an extra weekend. The benefits for one's mental health and family or social life are enormous. Not to mention increased productivity and extra disposable income.

FirmwareBurner5• 3 years ago

Yet companies still don't get it.

sgu999• 3 years ago

Companies are people, and many people don't like to give others what they didn't have. They wasted time commuting to reach the top of the corporate ladder, you will too. They also like to show you that they have prettier shoes and a bigger watch.

whateveracct• 3 years ago

I'm awake more than 5h/day on the weekend :)

ta12432• 3 years ago

So you're saying that people should be working an extra 10 hours a day? Otherwise they are just stealing time and money form their owner^W employer

cultofmetatron• 3 years ago

employees aren't paid for those 10 hours of commute so mayeb it would be more accurate to say "they are just stealing time and money form their employee"

keiferski2• 3 years ago

It does surprise me that there isn’t more direct gamification used by companies, at least by startups. Even something as simple as using a 2D basic RPG “company space” (instead of Slack, Google Docs, etc.) would be fun and visually more interesting than using a bunch of apps that all look exactly the same.

While I am a little skeptical of current-gen VR tech, it might be cool if companies in the future have custom-designed digital VR workspaces.

pablok2• 3 years ago

As soon as you gamify something, it ceases to be the same kind of problem it was in its original form. I can't say work was gamified, but it certainly feels closer to that considering the core ideas behind the NFT/crypto gamification craze.

wheybags• 3 years ago

Seems kinda backwards. I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts.

I'm making a puzzle game, so the comparison to dev work is pretty obvious. The difference is when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution, and the world is crafted to make finding it as fun as possible. The real world is messy. Questions like "should we even do this at all" come up. There are edge cases, and your information is imperfect.

In a puzzle game, you can (generally) see everything, you know what you can see is 100% correct, etc. Games are like an idealised chunk of real life, not the other way around. And IMO that's by design, not some accident.

sandworm1012• 3 years ago

> when you play a puzzle game, you know there is a solution,

Not in my solitaire game. It actually shuffles the cards, dealing them rather than working backwards from a solution. I have been dealt games with no legal first move, and many more with only one or two dead-end moves. These deals have no possible solutions. Similarly, I have run across more than a few sudokus with more than one solution, meaning there is no actual final answer.

Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.

RussianCow• 3 years ago

But to be fair, "there is no solution" is, itself, a solution. Even in Tetris, which has no natural win condition, you're playing towards a specific, well-defined goal (points, generally).

The OP's point still stands in that there's no ambiguity in a game, whereas the real world is full of it.

GuB-42• 3 years ago

Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.

Tetris is actually quite lenient in that regard. Mistakes are rarely fatal, you usually need to screw up pretty badly to find yourself in an unrecoverable situation. Generally, you lose by making mistakes at a higher rate than you can fix them. This is in contrast to games where you have a limited number of lives, famously a single one for Rogue, hence the term "Rogue-like".

And while Tetris have no "hard" ending, like many arcade-style games, at some point, it becomes effectively unplayable. Maybe that's what made it successful, it is an arcade game as much as it is a puzzle game.

numpad02• 3 years ago

For Tetris: keep two rightmost columns open, and always prioritize on laying flat than plugging every holes. That way, any blocks can be just hard dropped to that slot to immediately clear two rows on average, and keep depths of notches and peaks to around two as well.

Funny thing about this is how knowing these tricks completely change gameplay, and that everyone who knows always reserve up to ~15% potential for immediately presentable and tangible results, and it's naive hard working players who gets punished, and it has no promises that it always works, and that these facts adds so much Soviet-ness to the game!

ZoomZoomZoom• 3 years ago

Famously, what made Tetris so different was it's soviet style. There is no end let alone a solution. There is no second chance. Your mistakes just pile up until you fail.

This is the central theme in the Tetronimia (Tetris clone) description:

"The only winning move is not to play"

And later:

I don't like computer games. They:
Steal your time
Replace meaningful activity
Show how easy it is to manipulate a human into doing silly things
Deceive you into thinking you're in control
Disappoint you in the end
Tetronimia does all of the above. Nothing more. It's ideal. Did I mention you can't win?

https://github.com/indiscipline/tetronimia

randomdata• 3 years ago

I would say a video game is like a job but (hopefully) without the bad parts.

I find video games to be like a job, but without the good part.

mattlondon• 3 years ago

Games are fun though, work is tedious and 99% of people would quit immediately if they won the lottery (...but I bet they'd still play games even with millions in the bank)

JohnMakin2• 3 years ago

People often describe me as unhappy, yet I'm one of the only people I know whose life would barely change if they won the lottery. In other words, I'd still be doing the exact same work I'm doing now, albeit probably with greater freedoms/less stress than I do now. I guess that means I'm "content" or whatever.

tombert2• 3 years ago

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this; certainly more energy than it deserves since I don't buy lottery tickets.

If I somehow got enough money to where I never have to work again, I think I'd still do software engineering at a company, but I think I would stop focusing on how much I'm being paid, and more importantly, I'd stop being scared all the time.

I've been "laid off" (really fired) twice in the last year (and there's still time for a third!), and it's led to a near-constant state of fear on my end. Every time my manager schedules a meeting, I'm petrified that it's gonna be outlining the details of my severance and COBRA. Every night, I'm psychotically checking my email to make sure that I didn't forget some requirement that's going to piss off an executive. I'm constantly afraid to speak my mind at my job because I'm afraid that if I say something unpopular that it will be the final straw, and I'll be stuck spamming LinkedIn again.

If I had millions upon millions of dollars to my name, I think I'd have less anxiety about everything. If I get fired, who cares? If I get a bad review and don't get a promotion I want, no big deal. The job would be there to supply me with a stream of interesting problems, not an existential requirement.

ETA:

Just to be clear, my managers at my current job are perfectly nice, they've never done anything to make me feel like I should be walking on eggshells, I'm just dealing with some trauma.

Gwarzo• 3 years ago

Catchy title. I work from home as an MSP Enterprise Network Engineer - nothing about work feels anything remotely similar to video games.

I think I'm qualified to know, as I spend way too much time playing video games.

bigbillheck• 3 years ago

I wonder why the author didn't trim down that first twitter screenshot, those no-content pay-to-prioritize bluecheck replies don't have any actual content.

doctorM• 3 years ago

This seems particularly relevant: https://www.fastcompany.com/90965361/why-did-the-metaverse-d...

(Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38110059)

unixhero• 3 years ago

Life... it has game-like properties

jWhick• 3 years ago

Unlike the in office work which is totally different than videogame. I mean you can draw comparison between anything and a videogame, but honestly working in office just sucks.

kodt• 3 years ago

And here I thought the tweet was saying you get paid to play video games all day...

thih9• 3 years ago

Remote work is like playing a video game (…)

Haha, no; at least not much more than regular work is - and it all depends on a particular workplace.

Can you have a peaceful on-site office job with lots of uninterrupted focus time and challenging and engaging tasks? Yes.

Can you have a miserable remote job with pointless meetings, deadlines, context switching and an overbearing meaninglessness? Also yes.

byteware• 3 years ago

I am in a such a "meaningless" pickle myself, I have never imagined that hard tasks with strict deadlines are a breeze compared to this, it slowly but surely chips away my will to live, even though on the outside it sounds wonderful

pixelbyindex• 3 years ago

The best encouragement I have for this thought trap is to not put your career on a pedestal, and instead find the things you truly want to progress in or enjoy and focus on those.

In my case, despite being a programmer, I am a creative type. I have found that I routinely need:

- 1-2 hours per week playing an instrument or writing

- A date with my wife that is scheduled like a meeting that I cannot ignore or cancel

- A secondary (or 3rd or 4th) project outside of work, where there is a clear goal and progress is measurable (indie game dev for me)

xorcist• 3 years ago

Sure, why not? In this age who can tell what work even is anymore, and even less so games.

Given how much time and money is invested in things like Euro Truck and Farming Simulator, I have been silently awaiting the era where people pilot (real world) drones doing real world work, and pays for the privilege.

That's when it has gone full circle. I hope I'm still around to comment on it. I also hope pensions still exist so I don't need to take part.

michaelteter2• 3 years ago

easy to confuse physical presence with productivity

Early in my career I worked for the US division of a giant Japanese company. On the occasions that executives from Japan would come visit, we were expected to periodically stop working (programming) and carry papers to and from other cubicles and manager offices.

This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.

eddtries• 3 years ago

Japan is improving here thankfully! I’ve heard of workplaces that have drones fly around buzzing at 6pm to try kick people out

ben_jones• 3 years ago

Wait wouldn’t a drone hitting a person or a ceiling fixture and then crashing into a person be really dangerous?

Like they’re fixing workplace culture by careening rotary aircraft around the room?

pfannkuchen• 3 years ago

Maybe management knew you were faking and it’s the thought that counts?

johnnyanmac• 3 years ago

Maybe, but that's also just how Japanese culture was for decades. Presentation matters 10x more there than in America (and presentation still matters quite a bit in the US).

thequadehunter• 3 years ago

This is just Japanese culture. A lot of time, people know it's less efficient, but the Japanese idea of efficiency in itself is different than in the US.

In Japan, it's not about doing things in the most efficient way. It's about being on the same page as everyone else. The mindset is that even if this way is less efficient, if everyone does it the exact same way every time, you can guarantee quality and consistency. Hard work is also held in high regard even if it's dumb work, because you're signaling to everyone that you're a team player-- as opposed to a rockstar who wants all the credit and recognition.

The upsides to this are what Japan is famous for-- quality and consistency. It's why the train is always on time and the convenience store is always around the corner. The downside is that you're often punished for innovating or thinking on your feet. I personally think this is why Japan is famous for quality products rather than innovative ones.

david422• 3 years ago

I've learned that appearances can be just as important as actually being productive.

ie It's important that the big bosses know who you are and think you are productive, and sometimes that means being less productive in order to show that you are productive.

mdgrech23• 3 years ago

Feel this speaks how to the social classes omnipresent in our world. We want to pretend we live in a classless society but we really don't. If you have to work for a living you're working class. Too many people these days have become corporate sympathizers trying to justify this absurd bonuses to CEOs.

zikduruqe• 3 years ago

Looking like I was busy is the hardest job I have ever had.

techdmn• 3 years ago

I am endlessly annoyed by the gap between providing value and appearing to provide value. In an ideal world management would be able to distinguish between those working hard to serve customers, improve the bottom line, etc, and those working hard to give that appearance, rewarding the former and penalizing the latter. The gap between such a world and the one I regularly experience however, is so wide as to be nearly unfathomable.

jefurii• 3 years ago

I worked at a Japanese restaurant in college and had to learn how to walk-run to give the impression of busy-ness in order to keep the manager happy. Later when I worked in Japan the OLs (office ladies) always did it too.

ryandrake• 3 years ago

I've joked in the past (in WFH vs RTO threads) that in order to appease the people who want to see a busy in-person office: companies should just hire actors to run around the office carrying clipboards, sketching on whiteboards, and looking busy, because the visual, performative art of work is all that's important at a lot of places. I wasn't 100% serious about it, but here we are.

Aurornis• 3 years ago

Weirdly, I've been asked to do the virtual version of this with a remote job.

The company's business analysts started tracking everything in dashboards, including our Slack messages. Apparently they would pull up charts of things like messages sent by team or by person, and charts showing when people sent Slack messages.

They tried to claim it was just for fun, but then someone slipped up in a meeting and said that they didn't think a team was working much because their Slack activity was low.

After that, managers asked us to move more conversations into Slack channels, send morning and evening updates, break up long messages into smaller messages, and other things to get our numbers up. You could tell the managers hated it as much as everyone else, but I guess they were doing us a favor by telling us how to play the game.

the_sleaze9• 3 years ago

good managers in a bad ecosystem. Sounds like you were lucky to have them.

Y'all should've written some automation to send random buzzword paragraphs and system diagrams at a regular, random cadence.

ngcc_hk• 3 years ago

Or no of programmer … the founder of this site actually have to hire some more body so yahoo can buy his two person lisp based software.

xyzelement• 3 years ago

This is an example of a helpful reframe. I've done something similar.

From my first job, I took the attitude of looking at work as a challenge I can take on and have fun doing it. For example "what can I learn / what experience do I need to level up to where my boss is" (then, repeat.) Or - "what hard puzzle/challenge can I take on that I don't know how to solve today?". Or "where can I position myself job-wise so I can learn the most?"

I find that this is both a set of questions that leads you into good places (you're constantly evolving) but also you frame it as fun. Someone else could approach the same situation with "I am anxious and I need to constantly sink or swim, how do I make myself crazy doing a bunch of work" and they'd certainly have less fun and perhaps not do as well.

michaelteter2• 3 years ago

The real game in on-site and remote working is posturing and self/team-promoting during big company meetings.

It’s super annoying to hear the guy who always makes his team sound like they are inventing the iPhone each week, but it does seem to result in better promotion opportunities for that person (especially) as well as his team members (to a much lesser extent).

It does remind me of poorly designed quests where you have setup mini quests which do little aside from wasting your time, but are required if you want to succeed long term.

NorwegianDude2• 3 years ago

A video game is like a very simplified world. Life is a really complicated and usually slow paced game.

One thing I find really interesting is how much better some are at games compared to real life. I guess that's because games are fast paced, so you are rewarded much sooner. Just planning and sticking to that plan can get people very far in reality too, but it's so much harder because it takes so long.

FFP9995• 3 years ago

I think one key thing is, games are designed to be winnable. Despite what we tell children, in the real world, often clever ideas and hard work come to nothing.

NorwegianDude2• 3 years ago

Games can be designed to be winnable, but many games are not.

Working hard is not the same as working smart. That's kinda what I was hinting at. Many people are able to make much better decisions in games compared to real life.

iamcasen3• 3 years ago

I still find it hard to believe that fully-async working style is more productive in the long run. My experience with it was that the pace of synchronous collaboration and decision making is about 5X faster than async. A group of engineers or a product team standing around a whiteboard in physical space is going to win the day every time IMO.

Perhaps if a company has reached series A and developed a lot of in-person trust and communion, they could successfully start expanding to a remote situation.

I really think it just depends on the work that's getting done, and the nature of the collaboration and decision making that's required.

hiAndrewQuinn4• 3 years ago

I prefer fully async for the simple reason that programming is all text.

A programmer is first and foremost a textsmith. They create increasingly complex textual creations, and develop a deeply refined, idiosyncratic toolkit over the years for doing so. No reason to strip them of their best toolset if you don't have to.

sojournerc• 3 years ago

If a job as a developer was 100% coding you might be right, but collaboration, problem solving and brainstorming work far better in person, at least in my experience.

ipaddr• 3 years ago

That's an old outdated way of viewing the world. Everyone sitting around a whiteboard trying to brainstorm an idea is wasteful. Someone comes up with an idea and then everyone takes some credit and you've spent $10,000 and wasted the day but feel productive but deep down you know you didn't need most people in the room.

iamcasen3• 3 years ago

I disagree. My best ideas come in the presence of others. Something about the collective energy evokes new perspectives I did not have alone.

I think its a waste to get 10 engineers in the room to decide how to build a single module. That would be stupid.

But it likely makes sense to get a designer, an architect, and a product manager in a room. It might also make sense to get an embedded systems engineer, a cloud engineer, and a web engineer in a room to architect something.

financltravsty• 3 years ago

I think the major assumption is that collaboration is synonymous with productivity.

Candidly, in my experience, the results of collaboration, a lightweight version of "design by committee," have always come back to bite in the long-run. Primarily the issues are: diffusion of responsibility and accountability (i.e., since we all came up with it, then if it goes wrong it was bound to happen and someone else is responsible for fixing it vs. if I came up with it and it goes wrong, it's all on me) and lack of cohesive vision (i.e., the designs and decisions made are incongruous and lack cohesive vision; they're the result of slapping together everyone's, one could argue what would be in isolation, good ideas, but without the necessary steps taken to connect them altogether in a proper fashion).

If we assume the latter, rather than the former, then all that's increased is the speed of sub-optimal processes. One could even go so far as to say it's mostly theater similar to having everyone in the office: the appearance of work is more important than the actual outcomes of the work.

When everyone's together it's very difficult to get a quiet moment to yourself to really think things through and plan things out thoroughly. Instead you default to a more social, collaborative process.

From my own career, I've found I don't need collaboration often. I trust my ability to gather all the information I need, deferring to and asking for the help of experts that know more than I do, while still having the good judgement to synthesize it together into a cohesive and practical plan. In other words the buck stops with me.

iamcasen3• 3 years ago

Collaboration is absolutely required when the product is undefined. You as an engineer would not be able to do your job correctly unless you could communicate with a designer, a UX-researcher, a product manager, etc (unless of course you are talented enough to fulfill all of those roles by yourself).

Quite typically, communication between all of the above parties is required quite often, as snags are discovered along the way and they constantly require re-working and tweaking the original concept.

neogodless• 3 years ago

The teams I've loved working on make the best use of what people are good at doing.

The people that need to "get together" to share untested ideas so they can make a decision, or share analysis to provide evidence of the validity of a plan will do so without the engineers that do the work. There has to be someone there that has an idea of engineering or architecture, but not the whole team.

In other words, even just a product manager and a CTO or architect can figure out what needs done while not knowing the details of how it will be done, but then they'll pass that information on to the implementation team. Individuals are paid to figure out how and to execute on that.

hiAndrewQuinn4• 3 years ago

I wonder if I've had an unusual start to my career wrt remote work. My career began remote, stayed that way until my employer enforced RTO still during COVID-19... which I proceeded to follow for about 2 weeks before moving to Finland for some reason, where WFH is more the rule than the exception for software jobs.

On the other hand, WFH is the only reason I have any desire to do 10-11 hour days, because I genuinely like working but only from the comfort of my own home. Even when I was in high school I preferred to skip class to read the textbook instead.

jimmydddd• 3 years ago

I was the same in high school. I always did well in classes that followed the text book, because I would just read it and learn the material at home. Teachers who didn't follow the book and tested from their notes always gave me a problem. :-)

hiAndrewQuinn4• 3 years ago

They were the worst! Luckily I had less and less of them as I got older.

HomeDeLaPot2• 3 years ago

For some reason? Did you just go to sleep one night and wake up to find yourself in Finland? :)

gryn3• 3 years ago

he probably doesn't want to delve into it because it's not relevant the his point or a private matter.

btw, is your name a pun on "Home De_pot" ?

FirmwareBurner5• 3 years ago

moving to Finland for some reason, where WFH is more the rule than the exception for software jobs

Maybe I should move to Finland. Here in Austria the norm is working in the office and WFH the rare exception.

hiAndrewQuinn4• 3 years ago

I'd recommend it if you're like me and basically only care about having a quiet life with your family. I'm on the extreme end of not enjoying big events, though, to the point where I didn't even attend my own birth.

helloplanets• 3 years ago

Out of all the games that would be closest to WFH, EVE Online takes the cake.

Most people who play the game seriously are part of a bigger organization, usually climbing the ladder by being trustworthy throughout the years. A lot of important things take place outside of the game itself, on Discord and sometimes even face to face.

The end game is basically you being able to effectively operate within an organization. I'd argue that's what most MMOs end game is at its core, but with EVE Online there's no sugar coating whatsoever.

TheAceOfHearts• 3 years ago

For anyone interested in learning more, Into The Deep recently released a 6 hour documentary on the history of EVE Online [0].

[0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=BCSeISYcoyI

qup• 3 years ago

I have an interest, but I'm not sure if I have a six-hour interest. Wow.

larodi• 3 years ago

So office work is like playing games in a gaming club then? OR all IT work is just a joke, or this whole article is a joke marginalizing the work of IT personnel?

majormajor• 3 years ago

Much of the video game metaphor isn't unique to IT/Software/Remote work at all.

"You have a list of tasks, and some are side quests! Sometimes you work more directly with coworkers, some are more solo!"

It's almost as if video games are modeled after life and work and "quests" just naturally have a lot of structure in common. ;)

(Most of the rest of the post seems worlds away from video game similarities, though...)

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF• 3 years ago

If only job quests' completion status was determined by a machine as in the video game case. There also aren't many video games which keep assigning the same quest because the game forgot why it's a "won't fix" quest when it hired a new QA person.

rchshld• 3 years ago

Well, it's funnier to play inda game club

A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely

Related Stories