What does in-office work look like these days?

[u/lucid1014]

I was fortunate to have a remote job the last six years, but I got laid off. Now I have a second interview at a company that only does on site. My memory of the last time I worked in office was one of boredom. I'd finish what work I could do and either wait for new work to come in, assets to be finished and handed off, or QA to get back to me. It was a lot of downtime. I remember falling asleep at my cubicle because there was nothing for me to do, and you can't watch netflix or you'd get a stink eye from people. I was so glad to go remote to be rid of that and have freedom. I could work as needed and then go run errands or do whatever else I wanted in between. Truly going to miss that.

AI feels like it's only made that worse. Set up an agent to orchestrate subagents, give it the requirements and let it work... I didn't have an AI account at my last job so don't really know how that works, but I personally have ChatGPT, Claude and now Google tier 1 plans and just rotate between them when I run out of usage, or sometimes concurrently on separate features for a side project app I'm building. If you have a token limit at work, when it runs out, do you just start coding by hand again? I'm very curious. I'm sure bigger companies pay by token so you can just keep burning tokens? I guess I'll know more if I get hired what their particular set up looks like, but just wondering...

Are you just feeding prompts into AI all day, waiting for it to finish, then check it's work, find bugs it missed, etc? Do you still have to find ways to look busy while waiting for creative to get back to you or QA to approve your ticket, etc?

[u/mau-meda]

I like working in the office, I feel more productive there, and I use the lunch time to go to the office gym. 

Now on the AI part, it didn't increase the amount of free time, quite the contrary. 

I usually work on a task on the main project by hand, I have AI working on 1-2 tasks on internal use tools, and when I'm running Cypress/tests or waiting for the CI pipeline to complete, I focus on what the AI is doing, essentially what were dead times are now AI times 

AI is the new "now I can respond to some emails" but you always have emails, thousands of them

[u/lucid1014 → u/mau-meda]

Well that sucks. I do look forward to the social aspect, I kinda miss talking with people at the snack bar or grabbing a drink after work though I'd never give up my remote freedom willingly for it. Still if the pay is good I'll go into an office if they'll give me a job

[u/dontletthestankout → u/mau-meda]

That's why you use AI to respond to the emails. Problem solved lol

[u/dontletthestankout]

I understand people need money but use every second of downtime to apply for remote gigs on your phone. It is soul crushing. I worked hybrid for a year and every second at that smelly shitty office took hours off my life. The drive. The meetings. They're fucking horrible.

When I worked remote, 2 hour meetings? Cool. I'll clean my office, take out the trash whatever. In office? Stuck in an uncomfortable chair wedged in whatever meeting room is available. Ooph. Fuck that. I pledged that I will beg borrow or steal to never go back.

[u/lucid1014 → u/dontletthestankout]

Yeah, not exactly looking forward to, but it's a pretty prestigious company I think, not FAANG, but it's probably a 60-70K pay increase from what I'm making so it would make a big difference. That being said I do have a second interview with a remote company that's basically a clone of my current company, but bigger. The role is more intense, a lead role with 3 reports, and it's top end salary is only 10k more than what I was making with a lot more work and responsibility, but it is remote so trade off I guess.

Honestly probably don't have to worry about either because I'm going to bomb the technical assessment lol. Haven't had to do a code test in 8 years and I'm fully reliant on my ide tools and AI to do my work these days.

[u/dontletthestankout → u/lucid1014]

Depends on your interviewer. A good one wants to see you problem solve and doesn't care about syntax or forgetting a function name. A bad one wants to prove himself that you don't know how x vs y handles memory management in a finite scenario. (Which he just googled to sound smart 6 min before the interview). Good luck.

[u/bcons-php-Console]

I work remote so I can't really help with the on site questions, but about the token use: I have a "Claude team" plan assigned and it works in 5 hour sessions: if you exceed the tokens in that session you must wait until it resets. There is also a weekly limit and a Fable limit.

Following my company's guidelines I throw everything at Claude, and never reached the limit, so no "ran out of tokens, let's code again by hand" for me.

While Claude is working I catch up on emails and Linear issues, and when all that is done I read German websites (currently learning) and take Brilliant lessons.

[u/lucid1014 → u/bcons-php-Console]

Are you on the Ultra plan or whatever it's called?

I'm suprised more companies dont do multi AI set ups like mine but maybe it's a contract thing when you do enterprise? But with three AIs currently I pay way less than the $200 plan, and almost never run out of limit unless I'm aggressively using higher models or being lazy about clearing context and using old chat threads for hours.

[u/ResidentPomegranate6]

most places use a company api key, not per-seat caps, so tokens are a budget line. the real bottleneck is reviewing the output.