I am 42. I am still coping with a question I've had since I was young and was able to get my first office job.<p>Why am I paid so much money to basically do data organization. I'm organizing data.<p>There are other people that build houses, grow food, prepare food. Then there are others that are simply entertainers - but that does provide societal value. I mean I guess in order to have entertainment, we have to have this giant other house of cards built upon just BILLIONS of people that just sit and think all day and talk to other people.<p>I'm just at a huge loss why we don't all focus on growing food and building interesting structures, ponds, waterfalls, arenas.<p>No, instead our society has billions of organizers of data. Eh, it's late and I'm tired right now maybe I'll feel more useful tomorrow.
Working 10 to 12 hours straight with only one or two half an hour breaks is no goal one should thrive for. Neither working 80 hours a week.<p>Heck, it would even be against the law in my country and it favors companies over people...<p>We tried gather.town in my team (we develop web services for a big news site) and dropped it after a week or two. While some people seemed to like it, others disliked it very strongly. I personally disliked it as well:<p>It drew lots of resources of my PC. It was like having MS Teams constantly running in meeting mode.
For me it felt childish to push a pixel avatar around in a virtual office. And also tiresome (its one more thing you have to keep in mind alongside your work). Having the camera on all the time is a no-go. And walking into the private space of a desk and talking to a person working there is as invasive and interuptive as it was before in the office. The app brought the worst of the office days into my remote days.<p>So all in all, it was a cute little game for a few minutes, but it made work feel miserable.
What the article didn’t mention is that trying to work with a camera constantly on is highly stressful for some people.<p>If it works for you, great. But don’t assume it’s better than regularly scheduled meetings.
I'm honestly exhausted just reading the article. What I was taking away from it was micromanagement/excessive control.<p>12-16 hour sessions, obsession with productivity and not efficacy, camera always on, notifying whenever leaving for 5 minutes, only a couple of 30 minute breaks (which in some countries like the UK would actually be illegal), no personal email or social media, and a skeuomorph of walking up to someone's desk.<p>It doesn't matter what the rules are, just that there are many of them and that there is no flexibility. This and the 12+ hour shifts, under total observation, are major red flags.<p>I question how many people were genuine when they said they enjoyed this, or if they were afraid of being honest with the guy who has exerted an unreasonable level of control over two thirds of their day.
This sounds like a nightmare to me. Working for 16 hours, checking in with somebody every 30 min, only getting maybe 3x30 min break, telling people if I’m gone for more than 5 min, and just so much more. Seems like a great way to burn out.
Setting Alexey's personal working style and focus aside, what are people's thoughts on virtual co-working in general?<p>Seems like there is a huge portion of people that have long since discovered that cities are not for them, but still yearn for some kind of group form of working.<p>There's been attempts as far as 2008 in Second Life[1], but also others in platforms such as discord, slack, minecraft. One popular zoom-based community for this is called Weekend Club [2]<p>Is this the future?<p>[1] <a href="https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/working-in-second-life-faq-r1571/" rel="nofollow">https://community.secondlife.com/knowledgebase/english/worki...</a>
[2] <a href="http://weekendclub.co/" rel="nofollow">http://weekendclub.co/</a>
I've been using gather for months now. The free 25 user plan is more than enough for the small side project I'm working on with a few friends, and even normies absolutely fall in love with Gather once they get into it. The art style is low-quality enough to not feel uncanny, and the maps are beautiful with great effects.
I hate these solutions that drive people towards having more and more meetings and working in committees.<p>If this is how you want to work with some people who prefer this mode of working, good for you. Go ahead and do that with that group of people, but just please leave me alone.<p>I want to work alone in a solitary and quiet setting with focus.<p>[Edit] I read a bit more, and it's even worse than I thought. You want me to be online all the time, and break my concentration every 30 minutes to talk to other people? How do people work this way? Perhaps I have a strong introvert bias when it comes to work, but even then, how do you build something creative with quality working like this?
A couple months ago there's an article that discusses the Study Web in detail: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27347028" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27347028</a><p>Inspired by this, I created a study/work Discord server that is focused on frontend design and development (arata.page/circle). Unlike the article in this thread, there are a few differences in our approach: first, the server doesn't enforce regular check-ins. Because the members are strangers from all over the places, we set our own schedule and do asnychronous chat during the break. Secondly, we tend to completely mute the input and output devices (some people like myself do a screenshare to keep them focus). This works alright for a tiny community like us.
@sabon I'm a full time solo founder (ex-Stanford, $180k made through past projects). I used Focusmate and hated it.<p>Have you heard of <a href="https://founderscafe.io" rel="nofollow">https://founderscafe.io</a><p>Basically gather.town but with an intimate group of founders from Stanford/Yc/Harvard etc. Thought you might be interested in it!
"One thing that I usually do when focusing is difficult despite these check-ins (which happens occasionally to me when doing something really hard or unpleasant), is I can tell my partner about the difficulty focusing, set the timer for 5 minutes, and write whether I was focused in gather.town chat every 5 minutes until the next check in. I find that these 5-minute text check-ins are sufficient for full focus on pretty much any task, however unpleasant."<p>This reads like satire to me. How can people work like that? Wouldn't it be easier to focus without the interrruptions?<p>Did you do that at the office too, stand up every 5 minutes and tell everyone you are focusing?
Gather.town seems fun if you're having a discussion or some kind of meeting as you can truly visualize and see who's interacting but to make it as your virtual co-working space, I do think that there are a lot of people who's going to struggle with this one and I'll probably get uncomfortable around the space.