With return to office (RTO), how do I do dev work in the office? I am getting nothing done.
After mandatory RTO I need to be in the office 5 days a week. In the past, I would go to the office for meetings, socialize with coworkers and come home to do development work in quiet where I could focus. It was great.
Now with RTO, I am surrounded by talking coworkers, people taking calls, the business side / project managers (their job involves lots of calls and alignment so very noisey). And then I have constant context switches with in person meetings every few hours. Not to mention the bathroom being 30 yards away and having to travel to another floor for lunch. AND traveling 40 minutes - 1 hour for commute everyday!
At home I have the bathroom 10 feet away, water dispenser 2 feet away, kitchen 5 feet away. And can easily get into the zone to code. I noticed stories that used to take 2 days are taking a week.
To fix things I am trying to start to follow this schedule:
7 AM - 11 AM : Stay at home and do deep dev work
12 PM - 2 PM : go to office get little done (meetings, lunch, distractions)
2 PM - 4 PM : find a private office and do deep dev work
4 PM - 5 PM : return to desk get little done (talking to team members )
5 PM - 7 PM : go home try and do deep dev work
I have also bought noise cancelling headphones and noise cancelling earmuffs to use at work (but honestly I feel rude wearing them at my desk).
Not sure how others are dealing with this or if I'm just super sensitive to noise. I don't think my plan is sunstainable because it requires me to be so isolated and so much of SWE is team work and learning from others. But it doesn't feel like I can focus at all in the office.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 0
6 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course HeroAs an SDE 1, focus time and landing commits is super important. On the flip side, you are also not super important to the broader direction/politics in your organization (at least not yet). So can you hack RTO by just booking a solo meeting room for yourself for 2+ hours at a time? Then you just go in there and work. I did this a lot at Meta when my desk area was getting way too crazy.
Anyways, Amazon RTO is so dumb 🫠
- 05 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
I have also bought noise cancelling headphones and noise cancelling earmuffs to use at work (but honestly I feel rude wearing them at my desk).
At Meta, putting headphones on was the implicit signal to coworkers that you were in focus mode and shouldn't be disturbed unless there was something urgent. I don't think you should feel that this is rude. Have you talked to your teammates about what the norm is at Amazon?
Could the fix be as simple as being more disciplined about limiting your socialization at work? I also think the point of the workplace is that you can have more unplanned interaction with coworkers, so I don't think it's all a bad thing.
3 hours of socialization/wasted time seems like too much, but you should expect (and even want) around 30 min of time of this informal time per day. This is especially valuable when you're earlier in career, when you may learn about different projects, priorities, or tips that can be very valuable.
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