@JaDogg I love it whenever I see stories like this, at the very least Workplace is positively affecting people that's for sure :)

@samwesley you should be able to talk in this room now.

Context:

Apparently I can't type today. Don't mind me, just cleaning up typos...

Thank you! It is a relief to find a less scrutinizing area than the cold question board.

I just wanted to know how often most programmers work outside of their office, say in a hotel or coffee shop or the like? And for those who do, what are a few of the most important things you need while working mobile?

@SamWesley hi and welcome to chat! I don't work remote all that much myself, but I hope the other folks here will be able to help out. FWIW, when I do work outside of the office I do so at home, where I can have a controlled and quiet environment. I get that some people can work in coffee shops etc, but I personally find it too distracting.

(Of course, if I have to travel for work then I might be working from a hotel room.)

Oh, and an ample caffeine supply is important. :-)

@SamWesley this is really dependent on company culture

Awesome! Very useful, caffeine seems to be the life blood for most people I've spoken with

@end

I agree with @MonicaCellio too, generally if I want to work from home it's because I want no distractions

Ahhh, so it seems that either the office or home are the best since they can be controlled

Thanks @enderland!

Yeah. Everyone is different though

You might enjoy this question:

It's related at least, not exactly what you are asking

Sure sure, do you both have a set up at home with dual monitors and such? or while at home or on the road do you just work from a notebook?

Thanks @enderland Ill look at that right now

@SamWesley honestly I just have a big monitor that I use, I don't do it super often - thogh I really should, I have a 40 min each way commute and my boss is pretty supportive of it

I bring my laptop docking station home, too

I've just asked my employer for a docking station and monitor for home use, actually. I don't work from home much because working on just a laptop is hard for me, but it'd sure be handy to be able to work from home some of the time and my company has a culture of that being ok -- it's just that I have some ergonomic issues.

I used to have two of them at work but one disappeared somewhere :(

For home use I'm willing to settle for one monitor. At the office I have two.

Interesting, so if it was possible to work with a mobile monitor would that have value?

I'm interviewing tomorrow for an internal job which would be 100% remote, though, so I might be able to have a better answer what my companies official policies are at that point ;)

Oh right on! Good luck on that as well @enderland

@enderland at work I have a 30" monitor that I mainly use, and a 24" in portrait orientation that I use to collect all the assorted detritus (IM windows, a dedicated shell, stuff like that).

I have 2x 24" 1920x1200ish monitors

@SamWesley someday I hope that somebody will invent some sort of portable monitor that fits in a laptop bag but can be unfolded to a good size. :-)

@enderland good luck!

I'm not sure I 100% want the job though, so there's that ;)

Haha well @MonicaCellio someday in the near future I hope to be producing that for you!

@MonicaCellio would it be valuable to have a separate hard drive dock with this mobile monitor?

and @enderland whats holding you back? working remotely sounds fantastic

@SamWesley interesting -- will it have a break in the middle? A lot of the value of large monitors for me is being able to have larger windows, so if the text in them gets glitchy at the fold point that'd be a problem. (It's why I can't just spread a window across two monitors now -- the monitor edges are in the way.)

@SamWesley well I'm not convinced the job would be that great, but, I'm interested enough to interview

@SamWesley don't know. I mean, I'd be using it with a laptop (or, I suppose, in principle a tablet or other portable device), so if I'm also carrying around an external hard drive it's probably USB. If you provide USB ports they can be used for disks, or a mouse, or some other gadget. What's the benefit in making it specifically for a hard drive?

Hmmm @MonicaCellio we were not planning on making it much larger than a notebook screen but instead allowing it to be portable with a hub that allows for more usb ports and hard drives. The idea behind the hard drive is that you can interchange them depending on the project or your needs so you can pull one out and throw a separate one in to suit your needs

I figured that a hard drive would be nice because it would take away the need to cary an external hard drive and flash drives instead it would fit snug inside one piece with a control board and additional usb ports

@SamWesley oh, fully swappable drives as opposed to auxiliary. Gotcha.

@MonicaCellio does that sounds valuable or uneeded to you?

@SamWesley I haven't really thought about it. It seems like, to be useful, it's going to need to have a full OS and app suite and stuff on there (if it's the hard drive), or maybe I'm still misunderstanding. That sounds hard to set up, unless you're also solving that problem?

Speaking personally, you're competing with my (work) laptop, or for personal use my ASUS transformer tablet (tablet with optional keyboard). Neither screen is all that large so I don't do "real work" on either without an external monitor. (I use the tablet for casual surfing and similar; I've never plugged a monitor into it.) I may not be your typical user.

I see, the preferred user would be a programmer looking to work outside of their office on a comfortable set up but one that is able to move as smoothly as a laptop does. The 2nd hard drive would be used for storage and the second monitor for just extra screen space but each would be connected to the users laptop and run off that

Ah, I see. So laptop + additional monitor of comparable size (plus other stuff), nice and portable. That sounds handy.

The goal is to allow a programmer to work from the coffee shop in the morning, cowering space during the day and the hotel at night all while producing quality work and not sacrificing their comfort

(And speaking of work, I must get back to it now.)

coworking*

haha, I thank you very much for your time @MonicaCellio!!!! It would incredibly helpful

and @enderland you as well!

@SamWesley btw if you click over the top left corner of a chat message you'll see a pop-up menu that includes an "edit" link. You can edit messages for something like two minutes after posting them.

@SamWesley glad to help. People come and go in this room all day, so if you hang out you'll probably find others to talk with. Good luck!

Perfect, thank you!@MonicaCellio

yeah there's generally people here

Cool! I'll be sure to stop by again later today!

wow, busy chat this AM

@SamWesley you may also want to try the programmers chat room if you have the rep

ugh, I fail at linking

@MattGiltaji ;)

@enderland thanks :D

@MattGiltaji it's [link text](url)

@enderland I thought I edited it to fix that, I'm a bit out of practice on my markdown these days

my question got 2K views in about 4 hours, how awesome is that!

@user24454 what question was that?

@MattGiltaji workplace.stackexchange.com/questions/35463/…

ah thanks

@user24454 so it looks like you have some good responses. When are you planning on selecting the correct answer?

Hey cooler cats. Want to run a Q by you before asking.

My team leader at work put me in charge of organizing a seminar for the team that's going to have a lunch break in the middle.

hey @AirThomas

I'm trying to decide whether to suggest that we go out for lunch together between the morning and afternoon sessions, and coming up empty on Google.

how long of a seminar?

10 to 3, hour lunch at noon.

is your company paying for lunch?

Ha. No. I work for the state.

Oh, that's a bummer

is it a mandatory thing?

Unclear, yes-ish

Team leader is a pretty informal guy and it's honestly less of a seminar than a glorified team meeting with assorted presentations and brainstorming.

Anyway this seems like a workplace topic but I've only lurked a bit so I don't know if it fits your scope.

I would say split up for lunch, unless you are ordering in and working through it

you're going to want to put regular bio breaks in anyway, to let people take care of their business rather than have people trickling in and out and having to rehash things

@MattGiltaji It's a somewhat informal work setting, and the sessions are only 2 hours apiece, so that hasn't been a problem.

I could do a detailed write up if you think it wouldn't be off topic.

(Collective you.)

you could ask a "what factors should I consider" type of question and that might be on topic

@MattGiltaji yeah, this is what I was going to say

but a "should I do x or y" question would get put on hold

Specifically it would be more along the lines of, "What are the implications for X outcome of making Y choice"

But, I'll do a little more research first.

the challenge I see with "what are the implications" is that it means you need to get REALLY detailed with your work environment, and run the risk of being too company specific

with "what should I consider to promote X outcome", its more generally applicable and should have an easier time attracting useful answers

Ugh. Search terms like "seminar" and "workshop" are terrible for finding research about seminars and workshops... =/

I wonder if I should ever use my experience/rep here as a discussion point in an interview

@enderland As interviewee or interviewer?

@AirThomas if I am going to be interviewed

I would think your role would be far more useful than your rep.

@AirThomas I guess, both are relatively interesting I'm sure for any "people person" position

@AirThomas I agree with @MattGiltaji -- if you ask it as "what factors should I consider?" I think that would be a fine question here.

@enderland for a managerial, team-lead, or HR position it seems like it'd help. For others, it depends.

@MonicaCellio I am likely going to apply for a product owner position internally in the near future, which it seems useful for

@enderland sounds like it would be.

@MonicaCellio Thanks, appreciate your input. To be honest I've never been a fan of the "what factors should I consider" formulation. It always makes me think, "I need to make a decision, but I haven't thought about it. Think about it for me, and tell me what to think about? Pretty please?"

Apropos of nothing, I just gave an informal presentation this afternoon that started with "y'all have heard of Stack Overflow, right? By the way, there are 200+ questions on our product here that we might want to look at. Anyway, what I'm here to talk about is reading that data into a database..." :-)

@AirThomas but on the other hand it's more "reusable" than "I have these specific circumstances; what should I do" where, unless an answer spells out "because of X and Y you should do this, but if X were really Z I would instead say...", the answers don't help anybody else.

@MonicaCellio Sure, but every question exists somewhere on the spectrum of generalization/specialization.

I don't actively dislike those questions or habitually DV them or anything like that. They're just not my style.

People answer with whatever they think are the important factors anyway.

@AirThomas understood, and a lot does depend on how well the question is asked. I've certainly seen, and for that matter asked, that were "here's the situation; how should I proceed", but where the asker has taken some care to focus on the key factors and generalize or abstract away some of the rest. (Hmm, not explaining this well I suspect.)

@AirThomas true.

Anyway, you've got good SE instincts in general, I think, so go ahead and ask it how you think best.

@MonicaCellio Thanks. :) (Time to go print up business cards that say "SEO" on them?)

@AirThomas I meant SE clues; whether you also have SEO clues I cannot say. :-)

@MonicaCellio I was going for a "Stack Exchange Optimization" gag

@AirThomas ah. :-)

@MattGiltaji Hey thanks Matt I'll check that out!