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0 pointsglobular-toast4y ago0 comments

Agreed. Some people really seem to think work looks like this: https://www.dreamstime.com/happy-diverse-office-workers-team...

If any serious work is being done in a company, it does not look like that. Why do people keep pedalling this lie? A big problem in engineering is a lot of the work is done by engineers in private and the supervisors don't get to see it or experience it. So they think it happens by magic and that maybe the laughing execs actually contributed to it.

Unfortunately there's a huge amount of people employed in offices who literally do come in all day and don't do any work. Working from home means you actually have to have some work to do. What we're seeing is a load of people realising they have no work to do.

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austinjp4y ago

I agree that execs who've never written code often have no idea what it's like, and I've worked with some who didn't want to know.

I've also worked in teams of engineers that did occasionally burst into laughter while gathered in rooms doing productive work.

I've seen engineers who did no work. I've seen managers who worked extremely hard.

It's all shades of grey.

throwaway3169434y ago

I think you might be a bit jaded. I do work at a company where team meetings look a lot like this and yes we do get real work done. We don’t talk and joke around all day but there is space for it. Oddly, other, more somber places I’ve worked were much less productive. People were more guarded about asking for help or collaborating and there was little communication between management and everyone else which led to a very us vs them mentality. It turns out that liking the people you work with actually does make work fun and productive.

paulcole4y ago

> If any serious work is being done in a company

You seem to be falling into the HN trap of “serious work = what I do” “not serious work = what I don’t do.”

I can assure you that group of people can provide value to customers/clients while looking like the people in that photo.

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