<story><title>A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely</title><url>https://dtransposed.github.io/blog/2023/11/02/Remote-SWE/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelteter</author><text>&amp;gt; easy to confuse physical presence with productivity&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>Aurornis</author><text>Weirdly, I&amp;#x27;ve been asked to do the virtual version of this with a remote job.&lt;p&gt;The company&amp;#x27;s business analysts started tracking &lt;i&gt;everything&lt;/i&gt; 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.&lt;p&gt;They tried to claim it was just for fun, but then someone slipped up in a meeting and said that they didn&amp;#x27;t think a team was working much because their Slack activity was low.&lt;p&gt;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.</text></comment>
<story><title>A Video Game That Pays: Lessons Learned from Working Remotely</title><url>https://dtransposed.github.io/blog/2023/11/02/Remote-SWE/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>michaelteter</author><text>&amp;gt; easy to confuse physical presence with productivity&lt;p&gt;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.&lt;p&gt;This apparently gave the impression that we were working very hard, when of course it was really making us less productive.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>ryandrake</author><text>I&amp;#x27;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&amp;#x27;s important at a lot of places. I wasn&amp;#x27;t 100% serious about it, but here we are.</text></comment>