Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual. Full time remote has done wonders for my health - instead of a 2 hour commute I get to exercise. Instead of coming home stressed, annoyed, and sitting in front of the TV, I go outside for a solid hour+ after I close my laptop. I travel more liberally now that I don’t have to take time off to do so. My quality of life has never been better, and my gratefulness translates into feelings of loyalty towards my employer. Why would I quit if I’m treated well and have a nice work life balance? Why would I risk this situation by slacking off when I am on the clock?
Prior to the remote shift, I was unhappy and I didn’t even realize. No exercise, no passion outside of work. All my energy went into my 10+ hour day (when you consider the commute).
Since then I’ve lost 30lbs, become enamored with new sports and hobbies, and my social life outside of work exists again. I feel more “alive” than I have in a decade.
I’ll never work for a company that doesn’t allow me that flexibility for the rest of my career, as long as I can help it. Companies that want access to good talent would be wise to follow this example.
Just as a contrast, I think I've had the exact opposite WFH/lockdown experience as you. My quality of life has tangibly and significantly degraded across every positive point you listed. Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before.
I used to bike to work, a productive 2 hours of exercise that kept me very healthy, mentally and physically. I got to see other people, even if they weren't strictly friends. Hell, I went outside on a regular basis!
Now I'm gaining weight (although not enough for a booster), lonely, and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.
Similar situation, WFH/lockdown massively degraded the quality of my life. Work became more stressful and metric-driven, social life died as all my friends & coworkers moved to their hometowns and I did too, and I've gained weight / fallen into a rut.
I was just under a year into my first role as a software developer after a career change, and I was learning a lot from my coworkers and still meeting people. If I was at a later stage in my career I would have probably loved this, but WFH has been pretty terrible for me.
Also important to note, my commute was only about 10-15 minutes and I was extremely lucky for that.
Any tips for mentors? I feel peer collaboration hasn't been too bad and honestly I strongly favor remote-style work even in the office. However, effectiveness in mentoring junior engineers has nosedived. There's more to programming than a pull request. Workflows, tools, and behaviors are also things that people learn from others. You don't get that over infrequent screen sharing and quick daily syncs.
By asking that question I think you've identified part of the problem, because around the time Covid started we lost a very competent senior dev and nobody has been hired to replace him.
Still, I used to have some pretty cool impromptu conversations in the hallway with people from other teams about projects they're working on at home, and they were great to learn from. With WFH I'd have never met some of those people. No idea how to recreate that environment.
My experience is that impromptu mentoring has essentially gone away and only concerted efforts remain. When I was stuck on a problem or just needed a break I used to walk around the software lab and look for someone who looked frustrated and then try to solve their problem. Obviously I don't do that anymore. Instead I do have (probably not enough) screen sharing work sessions with other engineers when there is a problem that one of us needs to talk through. It is a good opportunity to learn about how others work and get some work done.
I was thinking about it, but before as an academic before I always had the option to remote work, just I didn't do it at home. The cafe, the museum, just bike to my best thinking place in the morning and then bike to the university for lunch and an afternoon meeting. I never really had decent work and exercise opportunities at home, so I would spend as little time as there as possible.
These days I'm no longer an academic but ironically I've been full time WFH since I switched at the beginning of the pandemic. So now I have a nice house with a nice chair and a nicer monitor than I could get in the office. And an oculus 2 for exercise, which works out (but might not be for everyone). And those second places where I did all my best thinking outside of home and the office don't really exist anymore and might not ever exist again :(.
> and overworked as the involuntarily designated quasi-stay-at-home parent.
Ya, being at home would be really a lot worse if my 4 year old wasn't in pre-K.
My quality of life dramatically went down as well. I'm a highly extroverted SWE and I need some modicum of social interaction to be able to function at peak performance. Prior to the pandemic, I had a social life that I was very much grateful for.
I'm also a minority and don't come from Ivy League/Top 10, so I felt that my biggest advantage was the impression I could make on others in person. In a remote-first world, I lose my biggest advantage.
Me aside, I can't help but think there are some underlying drawbacks to a remote-first world that we aren't talking about enough. But I know that, at least within the tech industry, I'm in the minority by believing that a life that is easier and more comfortable is automatically the better design.
Very true but it felt strange how everything that evenhovercraft listed as something gained from remote work was also something that I had lost. I don't think a post-Covid world would change that for me. My office is downtown, with restaurants and attractions and people. My home is in a streetcar suburb and while it has lots of nice things to walk to, it doesn't have what you would call a night life.
Just wanted to say - I hope you’re able to find ways to get those things back in your life. Remote work is certainly not without its challenges and of course, not for everyone. Companies should let the individual decide for themselves.
Somewhat. Seeing people during WFH also requires advance planning now, to align schedules, etc. In a non-WFH environment, it was much easier to see people spontaneously. That has nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the fact that you were already colocated and could thus grab lunch, dinner, go out to karaoke after work, or whatever, and it could be done without significant advance planning.
One is not better than the other. It's not a contest. Kudos to employers who can acknowledge that different people have different needs and cater to both!
I understand the fact that you don't have the motivation of "gotta get to work/home!", but you could always get up earlier and go on a looped bike ride before and/or after work (I've actually seen a lot of people doing this as a sort-of "simulated commute", which they claim also helps with creating a mental office-home separation).
Which is why smart employers give their employees a choice of how to work instead of a one-size-fits-all solution that doesn’t. Working two days in the office is perfect for me for example.
First: you can disagree with someone and not be an asshole about it. Please consider reading the HN guidelines again.
Second: you are dismissing the fact that having an office to go to gave a lot of people a routine as well as forced social interaction. Now, it requires strict discipline to try and enforce it on yourself, whereas before it was a default.
I share this commenter’s experience. That you don’t is fantastic for you, but doesn’t make it any less legitimate.
You responded to someone describing their experience with an aggressive “just do it and don’t bother people fine with wfh,” implying that the poster was somehow trying to encroach on your ability to WFH. They never said that.
You even express your frustration directly in a sibling comment below.
Pretending your comment wasn’t rude, especially after elsewhere expressing your explicit frustration, is only half-true at best.
"Encroach on your ability to WFH" - you perfectly summed up the reason for the vitriol from remote-only people, IMO:
They are fearful that people with your stance will give companies a better argument for less remote-work. It's one thing when executives talk about it, because they're "not on the ground" and "just want control" or "don't understand individual contributors", but when peers like you support non-100% remote, it's a real worrisome prospect for them.
Sure, but it’s also a worrisome prospect for those that have had serious issues with WFH for a company to decide to go all-remote. Still doesn’t give them the right to be assholes. :)
FYI, it also read as excessively dismissive, bordering on aggressive to me. There's plenty of ways to phrase your disagreement without invalidating the person you're talking to quite so much.
You assumed they didn't consider they could just do it themselves. The issue is motivation. Going to work helped motivate them do these other things. Biking to work seems less pointless than biking to nowhere because they need to get to work, the exercise is a secondary benefit.
Edit:
Recommending they find a coworking space they can bike to and work from could have been a nicer suggestion (assuming pandemic ever goes away)
That was a pretty rude dismissal of a fraction of my experiences during all of this. You might want to reflect on what WFH has done to your social skills.
> That was a pretty rude dismissal of a fraction of my experiences during all of this. You might want to reflect on what WFH has done to your social skills.
I agree with you there.
The problem with WFH is that it doesn't force very many "transitions," which turns a lot more things into intentional acts that take more mental energy to initiate. The result it it's a lot easier to slide into a "blah" kind of state without even realizing it, and a lot harder to pull yourself out of one.
My social skills are absolutely fine, i can assure you of that.
But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason.
It's okay if you got a bit lazy during the pandemic and no one is denying that... but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office, you can just go bike or do some other physical activity it's probably going to get better.
> My social skills are absolutely fine, i can assure you of that.
I'm not so sure.
> But I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office because they can't go bike for two hours or some other dumb reason.
> ...but you don't have to pull all your coworkers to the office...
You're projecting that on him. He was just saying working at the office was better for him than WFH, he didn't actually advocate forcing anyone back, which was even made reasonably clear when he said:
>>>> Even if my employer began offering office access, I don't think it will ever be the same as what I had before.
> I am utterly annoyed with selfish people effectively pulling the whole collectivity back to the office
You might want to re-read their comment — there was no call for everyone to go back to the office, and the parent comment is right that you're being antagonizing for no reason.
Here's an analogy for you: I had a childhood I very much enjoyed, where I wasn't on the computer as often and I spent more time in nature. If I were to state this and how much happier I felt, would you start harassing me for trying to drag everyone back to the dark ages and ruining productivity? (No! I can express my own personal opinion and preference, just as you can express yours, and it's not automatically a call for everyone to do the same as me!)
Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed. Hope you weren't planning on collaborating using physical media such as whiteboard or post-it notes. Obviously we can do our best to reduce unnecessary meetings, but for those remaining necessary meetings, an in-person meeting is almost always more productive than a zoom meeting in my experience.
This is why both sides are so fired up over remote vs in-person. Your decision to work either remotely or in person has negative consequences for your co-workers either way. WFH folks are mad that they are being asked to commute, in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.
> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.
That's actually a good point. Conference speakerphones are garbage, so once one needed person is remote, everyone has to dial in. The experience is really only workable if everyone is using a headset.
> in-office folks are mad that they are being forced to use clunky online tools strictly to accommodate their remote-only peers.
This isn't just a side effect of WFH, offshoring/distributed teams force it too. Even before the pandemic, most of my co-located team's meetings were online, since we almost always had to accommodate someone who was based at another site.
To go a little off-topic, there are a lot of good arguments against open office plans, but weirdly the one that seemed hardest for advocates to shrug off was the difficulty of having a bunch of co-located people joining the same call, and having to deal with echo. I think that's because it challenged the assumption that work happened mainly in a very particular co-located way (e.g. like a bunch of people sitting at consoles in a mission control center).
I find it hilarious that people think there is still justification for an expense as large as office real estate / office rent, when the non-biased peer-reviewed studies all show a 15-20% productivity gain from WFH anyway. So what, you want to spend way more to be less productive? Offices are dead. Wouldn't want to be whatever idiot apple exec just commissioned their new campus. Useless real estate. Dollar value of $0.
> Conversely, other people are annoyed with "selfish" people forcing what could otherwise be a productive in-person meeting to now need to include one person dialed in over zoom, perhaps without a video feed.
And that is why you should seek remote only companies if possible. Add in asynchronous work culture. Let the "productive" people waste their time in video meetings.
Asynchronous culture and no-meetings-ever is great if you're a somebody who has the ability/experience/authority to take a high level task and run with it without needing to collaborate with or have input from anyone else, but that's not how most companies work in reality.
If you're waiting for multi-day turnaround times on agreements because there's back and forth where two parties are trying to have a debate over requirements in a document but both only check for updates every few hours, I'd argue you're not being as "productive" as you think.
It's true that many meetings could have been an e-mail, but there are a few crucial meetings that can save days by just getting everyone together in a room for 30 minutes to reach an agreement.
> It's true that many meetings could have been an e-mail, but there are a few crucial meetings that can save days by just getting everyone together in a room for 30 minutes to reach an agreement.
Oh, and what stops you from doing that in an async company? If the meeting is justified, that is. It's the other 98% of meetings that you get rid of.
And incidentally, why "everyone in a room" and not "everyone in a group chat"?
I find your take really interesting because everyone who is pro-WFH tells people that they love WFH because of this long list of things that I was doing before the pandemic, and they were free to do as well. I personally find the notion that by merely having a commute, your quality of life is 10x diminished than if you didn't.
If most employers make people return to office, are people just going to drop exercising? Would it not be fair to call that ridiculous?
Stop bullshitting. As a parent the dynamics are totally different especially with Covid measures still in place. My child has not been to pre school for 4 weeks due to sickness and daycare group being closed because of Covid incident. And that must be like the 4th month within this year. It’s hard to maintain any routine in this ever changing emergency.
> and my gratefulness translates into feelings of loyalty towards my employer.
Yes and in turn translates to better quality work. In my case, I'm consciously adding extra web dev cherries on top every chance I can.
I haven't set foot in the office since the beginning of 2020, mostly due to lockdown. My boss is okay with it because he's happy with my work. I will never go back, I'd quit first.
Things I don't miss:
* The shared microwave always covered with a layer of grime on the inside.
* The office coffee machine, you drank it because it contains caffeine.
* Noise pollution from loud phone calls about things you have nothing to do with.
* Air con
* Air con set to a temperature you would change if you could.
* Staff toilets in general. Men's urinals without divider partitions.
* The small-talk encounters replayed every day with slightly different arrangement of words. They can be enjoyable too, but this is a cynical list.
* Driving and public transport, they both suck.
* Alarm clocks. For the first time in my life I wake up at the right time without an alarm.
* Not being able to make really nice breakfasts that take more time to prepare. (Porridge using steel-cut oats requires a 25 minute simmer, for example).
You are me. We had cubicle walls that were so short they didn't make any difference with noise because half the employees were on their feet while having conversations away. Constant talking. It was endless. Non stop complaining about significant others. Thankfully I had an hour lunch to get away for awhile.
We overheard every call because it was cubicle after cubicle in one big room. But hey! Let's complain about the customer that we just overheard you talking to for 30 minutes. Let's relive it after every call. Man.
Hey yeah, let's have our personal cell phone alert tone be a Linkin Park song at the loudest possible volume and always leave on their desk next to you. What a hell hole.
Micromanagement? You got it! You haven't experienced pedantry until you've met my supervisor. If you misspeak a word he pretends to not understand what you mean until you've re-spoken it in a way he understands. Now that we converse over chat/email almost entirely that ridiculous behavior has subsided.
They rarely cleaned the bathrooms thoroughly. One urinal. One stall. Just gross.
Microwave encrusted with who knows what. Janitors don't clean microwaves I guess?
I'm not one of those people that has very specific temperature needs. But of course we had one of those people that was very underweight in the office that needed it to be much warmer than normal. Why can't those people just wear more layers of clothing and not make the rest us suffer in sweat?
Parking? Okay that was close. If you can find a spot.
I will never go back to the office. I will also quit my job first.
I started a new job this year. The employer and our manager have made it clear, IF you feel safe coming into an office once the company declares it safe you can. If you are never comfortable ever again with coming in to the office, you won't have to. They have dedicated themselves to what works best for each employee, zero pressure. Nobody on my team is going in it's been decided.
I am way more productive at home. I have ADHD and the distraction of an office environment is too much and makes it hard for me to concentrate. My productivity has never been higher. I don't dread going to work, I get paid enough that I do not need to find a better place. And I have been a remote worker since 2011 and never, ever want to go back to work in an office.
Heh. I’m not disagreeing with your experience (as it’s yours, obviously) but I’m amused because I also have ADHD and an way less productive with WFH because home has so much more distraction; in an office where others are working it was much easier for me to focus than at home where Netflix or hacker news is only a tab away, and there’s no risk of anyone walking by. Plus, pairing was sort of focusing by default as well, and that’s harder (though not impossible) to do now.
> Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual.
I feel like this is the key thing.
Instead of mandating blanket policies (whatever they are) that might not make sense for every team, trust your employees to self-organize in the way that makes the most sense for them and the way they work.
I'm in the same boat, and like you, doubt I will want to work any other way again.
The problem is that in many cases, the pro-office people, despite saying otherwise, probably do need everyone - or at least most, to be in the office with them for them to personally gain the benefits of the social office environment. The benefits of you WFO depends on your coworkers.
If you are a pro-WFO person on a team that offers flexibility to WFH or WFO, but nearly everyone but you is WFH, then what do you do?
In contrast if you are a pro-WFH person but the rest of your team is in the office, you probably don’t care as much because the benefits you gain from WFH aren’t dependent on your coworkers.
> It’s mesmerizing to me how so many think office life is a necessity for data entry work
I think it's more about how cities and communities are set up with commuting in mind.
Like, I live about an hour away from my best mate, which in London may as well be Mars. Bur our offices are literally 5 mins walk from each other, so messaging 'pint?' is SO much easier when in-office.
This is just an anecdote, and things have gotten better as the city has adjusted (gotten more involved in my local community for example) but I can 100% see why people are reluctant to change.
Nevermind open source developers building the software world we rely on via email for decades.
While this may work, some companies insist DevOps means involving the entire organization and all processes, rendering the word meaningless. So in face of such inflexibility, open source software developed for open source developers works a bit differently, much more flexible.
I'm a parent. I've had 2 employers in the last 7 years, switching in June of this year.
When covid struck initially, I kept my kid home with me. My job, aside from a daily standup and a weekly meeting, could be done while juggling my child. I worked really odd hours, bc I could. Early AM, later at night. But I got to protect my kid and my family from a disease I didn't know much about, for 15 months.
My new job disallows me to juggle him but it's still WFH. He started school anyways.
I exercise more. I meditate more. Go outside more - get little chores done, cut the grass on my lunch break rather than cutting in on family time.
The lack of a 45-115 min commute each way has been a lifesaver. Going to the doctor is faster and less time consuming bc my docs are near my home and not near my work. I can jog in the morning and still be to work "on time" rather than having to get up earlier and trade exercise for sleep.
And what's more.. When I do break, I get to see my wife. Or talk to my parents on the phone. At lunch I can catch up on a TV show, a podcast, a YouTube vid, that I'm interested in but my family might not be.
It affords me more ability to access my personal computer for things I might not do on a company machine.
I can do training videos and obligatory but time pointless and wasting meetings that never ask for my participation while in my "poor man's sauna" (hot bath + space heater in the room) or on a exercise bike or while walking around the block.
I miss being around people I like at work.
But alas.. I don't like anyone at my new job even a little
Even now in October you wake up in the darkness, and it's dark again at 4 pm here. When WFH you can decide flexibly what time is the best for you for an hour of outside activity. You can go out at noon to enjoy few minutes of gentle sunshine. Then, being recharged it feels awesome and the total productivity is great.
Yes the most notable effect is I can eliminate the commuting time and spend that to exercise outside (for 2 hours!). Now I can come back to improve my running distance, discover the joy of bicycling and so much more!
But I miss the interaction with real people. Sure you have application to help with chatting and meeting but somehow I long for the real connection. And I'm speaking from the perspective of an introvert. There's something that remote working can replace the serendipity. I felt I had much more creative ideas when working onsite.
> Very grateful that my employer has committed to remaining flexible with remote work. Full time in the office, hybrid, or full time remote. It’s up to the individual.
imagine working for an employer that treats you like a human being.
> ... There is a more intriguing possibility, however. Work that is largely done remotely may be more efficient compared with an office-first model.
I don't think in-person real-time communication is always effective. No, I personally think it's one of the least method of communication that can happen in an office environment when the topic gets slightly complex (that is, if the topic is complex enough for you to write a memo about it).
For those topics, I love to communicate with some "written" form, such as in an email, posts etc. Because doing the "writing" part allow me to conduct some research and analyses on the topic (usually took 10 minutes), which will in turn increase the quality of my reply.
If you standing right in front of me and asked a question that require a complex answer, then my reply will probably make me look like an idiot, because I might not able to discover all the information that I need to process and output within 30 seconds. Not very effective in my opinion.
One reason I have found real-time communication ineffective is that it favors the narcissists and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over everyone else.
Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept.
Oh, and did I say that this interruption and talking for a long time seems to get ten time worse over video calls for some reason – perhaps because Bob finds it easier to pontificate while in his pajamas compared to having to stand up and talk in front of his peers in the office.
Yeah, I know the standard retort for this is "your meeting must have an agenda" et cetera. Guess what, look at the last 5 meetings on your calendar and tell me truthfully how many of them have a real agenda (mindlessly repeating the title as the description doesn't count). People don't want to do it, because, guess what, it adds an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time.
So, I have found that just going the whole way and just having the entire communication asynchronously is often better at ensuring more equitable participation.
It's no fun if you don't enjoy confrontation but interrupting the interrupters a few times will eventually send the message you won't tolerate that kind of behavior. They will eventually learn it's not tolerated or accepted.
One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking. Then he would reintroduce the subject and if they again tried to take over this boss would literally say "We've heard what you had to say, but XYZ wanted the say something as well". More than just stopping the disruptive behavior you have to acknowledge it and make it clear something else will happen now.
>
One of my old bosses would just say "Hang on, hang on..." over and over until the steamroller figured out they weren't going to be able to speak endlessly and they'd stop talking
This is what people need to learn how to do. And I think this is the biggest issue I have with WFH is that it puts people in a position where they don't have to develop the skills necessary to resolve conflict. They can just leave a call or ignore an email.
I had a conflict with one manager while working remotely at one job and rather than even address the issue with me, she just removed me from the team Slack channel. I sent a very apologetic and peacemaking message, which she proceeded to ignore. Although I don't work there anymore, we do live in the same city. So if I do see her and she tries to pull a fake smile, I hope she's ready to address that immediately.
However you feel about interpersonal communication, I think I speak for everyone when I say: I don't want to be part of any organization where people can rise up to positions of leadership or decision-making without having any capacity or tolerance for conflict.
> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry. Meanwhile, Jane had a novel and imaginative idea that went completely ignored because Bob kept cutting her off saying why it wouldn't work early on when she was trying to explain the concept.
True story. I've seen it happen over and over again, and it's one of the many reasons why I would be very reluctant to become an employee ever again.
Doesn't matter if you're strictly an employee or not. I find myself doing this sometimes myself, as an external contractor. It's more about the dynamics of who you're working with and how you communicate. And... I'm now more aware than ever about how I can talk over others and possibly be suppressing input/ideas from others. Remote meetings are a mixed bag, because sometimes there's legitimate "talking over/past" others due to audio delays (vs POTS).
There’s a deeper aspect to this and that is that meritocracy is a fantasy. People skills trump almost _everything_ else, including black hat people skills like dominating a room.
What I sadly learned years ago is that a bad idea presented with absolute confidence and certainty will pretty much always beat a good idea presented with caveats and answers to questions that start with "It depends...".
The other thing I've noticed is that people who have good ideas are usually all too aware of the limitations and corner cases so will never present something with absolute confidence.
Similarly in research group the easy way to prevent criticism is to make your approach look as complex as possible, with as many math equations as you can cram and a healthy dose of lingo. That way people are too confused to ask relevant questions and management usually lacks the background to form an opinion so they will take the team silence as an endorsement.
it puts an element of asynchronous communication when you have to think of the agenda ahead of time.
Oh, the difficultly of getting people to think about things in advance. The number of meetings where it's clear that basically nobody has actually put any thought in, done any research, even read the entire meeting invitation.
Meetings become a way to force people to spend time on a topic, and the act of being there where everyone can see them means they can't goof off and do something else again.
I remember reading about a company (maybe Amazon?) where they spend the first minutes of the meeting reading the agenda and other reading pre-requisites for the meeting, then start the actual meeting
Also sometimes there is a situation where several people are involved and then it's necessary to forward the arguments back and forth. Better to get those people who don't talk to one another synchronously in a meeting agree/disagree on something without getting all the flak as the intermediate hop.
Meetings are bad but no meetings are even worse...
Hallway track and socializing more generally aside, this is one of the advantages of in person events as well. You may dip into an online event for a couple hours and mean to watch some other on-demand video--but I'm guessing most of us never do.
It sounds like it's a workaround for dealing with bad co-workers? You can still have these in async communication and others will just give up eventually. And then the guy who gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly.
Assuming you have a well-working team, real-time still seems more efficient to me, at least at my current job.
Great point! I think I briefly mentioned it in my post, but I think that maybe there's three separate categories that I'm talking about.
- Real-time communication in person (face-to-face)
- Real-time communication remotely
- Asynchronous communication remotely
The scenario you mention "gets asked something but doesn't reply until at least two others pester him via phone repeatedly” seems to be in the category "Real-time communication remotely" (phone is real time, but remote). I think that area is problematic too, as my post points out.
Overall, I guess my experience has been that asynchronous communication remotely and real-time communication in person are both better than real-time communication remotely (aka "endless Zoom calls"). Real-time in person seems to have more feedback loops where someone who is badly behaved faces social consequences (e.g. not invited to lunch, etc.); and asynchronous remote seems to prevent it a little by giving everyone an equal amount of space to express their thoughts.
But overall, yep, I think all of these are assuming less-than-ideal coworkers. But...that's reality, isn't it? With perfectly behaved coworkers, all three options can work perfectly.
Nonsense, asynchronous / remote comm just optimizes for people who live online. They can respond faster leading to an initiative advantage which was previously restricted to “egoists”, as you put it.
Bob sounds pretty annoying, but I would also say that this team has a leadership failure if this is what happens regularly.
If I was Bob's manager I would have a clear conversation with him about his behaviour, and I would - at minimum - make sure that everyone on the team has a chance to present their ideas without interruption.
Indeed. And this is also one of the things that would most quickly lead to a firing if the behaviour doesn't change at companies I have worked at (much quicker than poor output).
Maybe we need more structural hurdles than just the agenda — e.g. everyone gets an egg timer that refills more slowly than it empties. You flip it when you start talking.
> Guess what happens in this situation – Bob spends 40 minutes talking out of the hour's meeting about how his way is right, interrupts everyone, and by the end of the hour meeting the boss is saying “Well, why don't we do a proof of concept with Bob's suggestion” simply because everyone is bored and hungry.
This happens in Zoom meetings and phone calls all the time too. It’s even worse in remote land when it happens.
I have had great experiences over the past two years with the "Chat" box in Zoom (where introverts have the power to asynchronously "talk over" the blowhard extrovert!). And with the "Raise Hand" option in Microsoft Teams (which feels like less of an escalation than literally raising your hand in a physical meeting).
As someone who is accustomed to getting steamrolled in office meetings, the past two years have been life-changing. I actually feel like a member of a team for the first time in my career.
Assume good intent on the part of others. This is generally good advice, but especially true in the work place.
I have been “Bob” some times, but it was not out of ego.
Sometimes a meeting is called because there is a problem that doesn’t fall neatly into existing organizational buckets and the company is doing a scavenger hunt to identify existing domain experts. If you’re that domain expert, your role in that meeting is to quickly establish that fact and work to bring everyone to a shared understanding of the issue, possible causes, and possible solutions.
Also, sometimes meetings are not called for a conversation, they are called for an information broadcast that requires people’s undivided attention because alignment and understanding needs to be established before work can continue.
I have been on both the receiving end of “Bob”, and stuck being “Bob”. But, to your point having a good agenda is crucial, partly to frame things ahead of time so meeting participants know if this is a broadcast, a conversation, or a scavenger hunt. For the latter, most importantly because maybe “Bob” knows that “Linda” is the foremost expert on X and should have been invited.
> it tends to favor the narcissist and egoists in the conversation who are comfortable talking over everyone else
While this is a great point, I wouldn't say it is just narcissists and egoists. I spent quite a lot of meetings before being the "Jane" or just sitting waiting for people to end until I learned to cut off and intersect at a point, but I spent quite a lot of the time wondering why some people keep on talking and have noticed a few categories.
1. ) We got the narcissists and egoists. Some talk because they love to talk and hear themselves, some love the attention, some talk because they think only their opinion is worthy.
2.) We got "look how smart I am" talkers - Wouldn't put them in the first category, but these people will usually take a point other participants make, say it differently then start explaining it to prove themselves smart. Fits more under the category below, but is a category of its own since it can also be not from insecurity, but "smarter than thou" attitude.
3. ) We got insecure ones - some people start talking with the good intent of trying to offer useful information, but due to their insecurities they start overly-explaining it and rambling off since they keep waiting for someone to intersect and give them approval. You can usually notice them by the anxious rush to talk and weird "uhhh..ah...and...umm" breaks where they are checking for feedback from the audience, and if they dont get it, they continue talking.
4. ) The "breadth-first explainers" - These people are trying to communicate their idea or vision, but their method of communication is breadth-first explaining. Unfortunately, instead of "We can do A and B" they wander of into explaining everything related to every point in-between A and B. Example:
"We just need to make a HTTP Request... So we can make a POST call here - POST is the type of request that creates data - like POST with the new name, surname, title or it can be anything like the whole model, a file... other request serve for other purposes, you have GET.... (10 minutes later).. So we will make the client - this can be the phone, computer, watch - send the data to the server.."
They suck to have in meetings when its all about ideating and innovating. They are great to have in meetings when stuff is known and needs to be explained to customers/people out of context.
5. ) The managers - I call them the managers because they either call the meetings to discuss nothing or make sure the meeting is spend discussing irrelevant or tangentially relevant topics instead of dealing with the actual topics. They usually take someones question or answer to go off into unrelated, often philosophical topics. Still not sure why some do it and is it insecurity, showing off or just the lack of social awareness.
6.) The sellers - I'd put them with narcissists, but they deserve a category of their own. These people usually have something they want to sell or a narrative they want to push. They will wander off into stories that support their cause, taking up as much time as possible of the meeting to minimise time available to resist the sell. A lot of these usually work as sales and when the meeting is over, it's either their way or "lets continue the discussion some other time".
On the other hand, for complex topics I’ve found that a face-to-face conversation is often much more effective because it allows both parties to have a rapid back and forth to resolve misunderstandings or gaps in the conversation. Asynchronous communication is poor at this.
Discussion in meetings has felt mostly useless to me over the years for the exact reasons that the parent pointed out. On the other hand, some of the best work I've done was at a job where the person I worked with most had the same train ride home as me, so we'd just chat for half an hour 2-3x a week. It allowed both of us to work through ideas, and come to much stronger conclusions.
> for complex topics I’ve found that a face-to-face conversation is often much more effective because it allows both parties to have a rapid back and forth to resolve misunderstandings or gaps in the conversation.
Face-to-Face conversation can also happen remote synchronous.
To me, it sucks. (Video) calls are exhausting and less flexible, and nothing beats having a huge, real whiteboard and three people taking turns refining a diagram or flowchart while discussing it.
It can be. It's also very expensive when people are scattered across multiple states and even multiple countries. Basically no meeting with more than 2 or 3 people I'd likely be in would involve people only in one of my nearby offices.
In addition, while whiteboards can still be nice for certain things, over the past few years I've also come to realize that collaborative docs (e.g. Google Docs) are actually as good or better for a lot of purposes.
I don’t really know why, but now I’ve found this to be less effective than IRL for some reason. Like I have to make more of an effort to be properly understood, and come away less certain that we’re on the same page (and that we have to follow up more often because there were indeed misunderstandings). At least I experience this with some people, less so with others.
Not sure if this is due to something I lack, or if (some) people are less attentive/perceptive/focused in phone/video calls.
I've encountered this and I thought of some reason:
- it's easier to be distracted
- it's harder to read gestures and expressions, worse with group meeting
- with normal keyboard and mouch / touchpad even touchscreen, it's harder to sketch
- while small, there is latency and it can be distracting enough
IMO it's easier if the communication is one way at a time, not both at the same time.
Absolutely agreed. I've often found myself seeing that someone has misunderstood something, and wanting to write "if the source of your misunderstanding is (a) then [several paragraphs] whereas if it's (b) then [several different paragraphs]. Asking them whether it's (a) or (b) by email adds another cycle and often isn't understood anyway. It's just far more effective to communicate synchronously (face to face or by phone).
Yes, it is like flying a toy drone in your room vs. flying a drone on the Mars. In the first case if you see it heading into the wall you can correct it immediately. On the Mars it may be already too late when you find out it is heading into some boulder.
One example of where this is counter-intuitively wrong is that you end up with more diverse ideas if people brainstorm in private than in a group.
I think the reality of face to face meetings is that the result is often almost predetermined based on the existing group dynamics. How many people are turning up to the meeting feeling their input will make a difference versus people with (probably) the dominant personalities who are happy their established conclusion is chosen. And seeing the later as naturally coming to a better conclusion, faster.
As a dominant personality in meetings I definitely think about the effects of that a bunch.
If your meeting attendees are zoned out, they either need to be held accountable for not being attentive, or they shouldn't have been invited in the first place.
I agree, but with WFH its so easy to invite the entire team. I found the number of meetings I attend has skyrocketed in WFH - most would be better off with 1/3 of the attendants who took time to prepare instead of the whole team just to gather info.
It’s a round-trip latency difference. Standing in the same room, we can get perhaps 100, but certainly 50, responses in an hour from a small group. Video conferencing might be 15% less and that relatively slight difference is already frustrating. In asynchronous written form, it probably takes 3 days to get 100 “turns” and maybe a week or more if there’s timezone “smear”. The written async responses can be higher quality on average, but where reaching consensus in minimal wall clock time is important, face-to-face wins.
Why is Slack “better” than physically mailed correspondence? It’s roughly the same phenomenon, just on an even shorter timescale (including that Slack isn’t better for everything).
If you're a proponent of written communication- you'll argue that 100 'turns' of written communication will have significantly more valuable discussion than 100 turns in a meeting. Most of the turns in a meeting can usually be avoided by a google search beforehand
Totally true. There are many cases where even 2 or 3 turns of written comms beats 100 of spoken (and I'm one of the biggest proponents of written work and async work at my company).
But there are situations where speed of alignment matters more than the specific direction of alignment and other situations where the nature of humans requires a live, synchronous discussion. I couldn't build a relationship with my family using only written feedback and requests.
You want high and fast bandwidth between the different brains.
Me writing something in my cocoon for 15 minutes, then someone reading that and replying what is wrong with that is not very efficient.
Just throwing some thoughts in the open air and others responding to that, crystallizes much faster.
Same with giving feedback about user interfaces. It's so much easier to just walk to someone's desk and point at what you think should be changed. You can interact instantly.
That is not to say that I don't see the value in written communication, documentation and having a log of what happened. It's very much a trade-off.
What crystallizes may have been reached quickly but there is no guarantee it is the best possible choice given all the known and unknown unknowns that the experts may have not considered.
Then there is also the hierarchy of expert advice to consider where a room of experts some who are more senior (or louder or more convinced about their rightness) might push you towards a worse outcome than a well thought through option.
I feel a decision taken “live” with the help of experts needs to be viewed with more skepticism than less.
> a decision taken “live” with the help of experts
Maybe we are talking past each other, because in that case I might agree.
I'm talking about the case with only experts present. I know about A but not so much about B, the other person knows about B but not so much about A. We sit together and try to come up with the best technical solution.
I've felt like "group reasoning" in person is more like getting people on the same page to execute on an idea, which doesn't equate with the merit of that idea.
Once that discussion kicks off in a large-ish group, I've found it hard to pivot the direction of that conversation - if you think there's a better, independent solution that's not aligned with the group train of thought.
I think it works best when there needs to be a solution where no single expert knows enough to come up with the best idea. So a group of complementary experts where the solution is more important than individual ego's :).
But when it's kind of decided already, so more 1 way, written communication works better.
I was in some situations where there was long emailing back and forth between people. Then it was decided "to just have a call on this", and came to a solution in 15 minutes.
It's definitely about trade-offs, and I can see benefits in both. So I wouldn't just throw away the power that "a bunch of people in a room" can have.
It's very likely that meeting resolves the issue in 15 minutes precisely because of the back and forth before. The back and forth syncs ideas, so the meeting can be used for the decision process.
I think the best way is a combination of both. Async written message first to establish context, followed by in person communication—if necessary—to clear up any confusion.
For example, our team used to have a 15 minute standup meeting every day, where we would go around and give our status updates. Many people complained that most of the time, the information being shared wasn’t relevant to them. We replaced it with a daily Slack thread where people could share their updates. Then, in the 15-minute meeting people could ask any questions they had or bring up anything they wanted to discuss more. This resulted in the daily standup meetings becoming a much more effective use of everyone’s time.
>For those topics, I love to communicate with some "written" form, such as in an email, posts etc. Because doing the "writing" part allow me to conduct some research and analyses on the topic (usually took 10 minutes), which will in turn increase the quality of my reply.
That and to me at least almost more important is the ability to refer back to history.
You have a little oral discussion with your co-workers about an issue, or maybe ask for some clarification on something etc. Then a few days later when you think you need that info again, it's gone.
Having a discussion in Slack, Mattermost, email, etc allows me to always refer back and see what we've been talking about. Which can be vital especially in those situations where we're talking about complex issues with complex answers. The fact that I can a week later go back and see the same clarification again, is definitely helpful
i find it easier to speak up in front of people way above my pay grade. the digital barrier erases all of what i would call the "scary boss" intimidation. allows me to ask more pointed questions no matter who is in the teams "room"
Not mentioned enough on this topic: not all engineers are software engineers and not all software engineers never need to touch hardware.
If you plan to work on/with web frameworks, advertisements, data science, or pure CS topics for your whole career, then there's probably no excuse to force you to come into the office 5 days a week. But good luck doing that as a software engineer at a company like SpaceX, Tesla, Intel, AMD, defense contractors, etc., let alone as any other kind of STEM professional. I think it's an important distinction to make. For me personally, some of the coolest work I can imagine doing is likely going to be done in the office/lab for the foreseeable future.
You're right that not all engineers get to WFH but more can than you'd imagine.
I know defense contractors that are working from home. Two of them did so before the pandemic too - remoting into hardware they're not allowed to physically touch even if they were in the lab!
A neighbour is a civil engineer and the huge screens he needed to do his job were only in the office. Now that he's moved that huge screen (and I mean massive, it's like a telly), the office have told him that he only needs to go into the office to meet clients.
I have a product design dear friend who bought himself a Prusa 3D printer and now can pretty much 100% WFH. He prefers it because he no longer has to share resources.
A neighbour is a network engineer and he spent 2020 decommissioning hardware in the server room and moving it into the cloud - something he said was inevitable for his business but the pandemic hastened it. He now WFH pretty much 100% of the time.
I know someone who works for a SSD manufacturer in the states and they WFH most of the week.
All the web/data devs I know WFH pretty much full time - except one but only because his boss is draconian.
Actually you are probably right. And it's not just building the environment: also unit testing, simple baseline algorithms, etc... We have a tendency to skip them.
Whatever you build, you will need to change, as this is the nature of SW projects. Being able to make changes fast will be life saving at some point
Yep. I do control systems for 20+ tonne hydraulic robot arms (among other things). 90% of the work I don’t have to catch a plane for can be done at home.
> We don't even have nearly enough hardware to give every engineer access.
This is the problem I always run into too. An emulator should be standard on any system development program that has software interacting with hardware.
I have spent my whole career working at places like AMD and NVidia, either writing systems software or doing computer architecture.
Yes, we work with various forms of pre- and post-silicon devices but you will find that either they can be accessed remotely, or you can send them by courier to whoever needs one.
So, sure, _some_ people need to be in the lab touching the hardware, especially during bringup, but the immense majority of the people, the immense majority of the time, can work remotely.
Works at lesser known places as well :) Courier the boards, remote into a leee-nucks connected to them, work on the soc manufacturer's sample which you can order from anywhere and then remote into the real board. Lots of solutions to do the job from home.
I think you are overestimating the requirement to touch the hardware by few order of magnitude for a software engineer there. Just yesterday I was reading a linkedin post from some senior electrical engineer in Apple M1 division and how they achieved everything remotely. For a fabless company, I don't think most of the engineers would need to touch the chip. Similarly for Tesla and SpaceX, they had great two years when almost all software engineers were working remotely.
I worked on flight software for cargo dragon, and one time I got an email asking for my help inside one of the capsules. I had to ask where the capsule was, and everybody lol'ed.
It was a fun day; I got to wear a bunny suit and a headset and climb around inside a space ship.
Yep, I read lots of Verilog nowadays. I think the implication is that you need to be on site to mess with experimental hardware. But that's not true. It's all colocated and cloud-based nowadays, even for companies that are otherwise paranoid.
I e done firmware development from home for over a decade. I need help once and a while from someone in the lab to push buttons or make connections or do reworks or whatever. But I have no trouble getting most of my work done from anywhere I have a half decent internet connection. The oscilloscope runs Windows and I can VNC to it. The (very old) logic analyzer runs HP-UX and connects to an X server to present its UI. We have network controlled relays and power supplies. We can get a lot done without physically being there.
Yeah sometimes you do need to touch things that you can't bring home.
But there are people like me, people who do touch hardware.. at home. My desk is full of hardware. Behind me there's another desk with an oscilloscope, lab psu, dmm, electric load, a pile of probes, a soldering station..
It's not like we get new hardware every day, and when we do, it's not a big deal to wait a day or two for the courier to bring a prototype to my home.
There are sibling comments here that mention the same, however, to add my own point here: I'm involved in a complex hardware plus software project which involves designing and doing a board bring-up for an Arm SoC Linux-based device. We need to visit the office only once in two to three weeks. For the board bring-up when we do not have the provision to provide the hardware to our software engineer yet, we have someone in the office connect the UART lines to it and have the typical VPN+SSH set up to perform the board bring-up for it.
Generally speaking, the engineers that are required for the labs would be electrical engineers and mechanical engineers. Also, even for these physical-based engineering disciplines, a lot of design is highly computer based thanks to great CAD, simulation, and future-looking generative design software from the likes of Autodesk, Ansys, etc.
That being said, I personally feel that being in person really can help in the epiphany process for hardware-based projects.
Yes, but not all non-software engineers need to _touch_ hardware.
Eg if you are a civil engineer, lots of your work is spent doing calculations and designing things. When you do touch hardware, it's usually 'on site' and not at the office.
Most of my job is working on drivers for hardware that is in lab thousands of kilometers away. I've never been in that lab, I just ssh to system with hardware to interact with it.
The irony is that while you won't do it as their employee, the same companies will happily hire offshoring companies that work just like that from the other side of the planet.
Aside from what others say, there is a trend to 'cloudify' even things like bench work in biology. Companies that allow people to run remote experiments. This will probably change the way university labs teach things
One of those things is not like the other things (it's the one where you build things that are explicitly designed to kill human beings). Not sure if you were calling that the coolest work, I certainly wouldn't call it that.
I think it's pretty cool. And I think that kind of work needs people who think it's cool, or else it'll only attract evil people.
There's nothing wrong with building weapons for defense. It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
Even for offense, other countries are working hard to build out their arsenals.
I'm personally fine with building AI weapons, for example. If a contract opportunity appears, I might take it. After all, where else are you going to see the most advanced weaponry in the history of mankind?
It's arguably the entire purpose of nukes at this point.
That is absolutely not true. There are people in the governments of every nuclear power would use their weapons aggressively given the chance. That's why policies of disarmament are so necessary. As long as humans have nuclear weapons the probability of practically annihilating our species and leaving any survivors living in the stone age again remains higher than zero.
Nuclear war is the single biggest existential threat humanity faces. We can deal with pretty much anything else.
For what it's worth, I agree with you. One of my sneaky reasons for joining the military establishment would be to help make those sorts of changes from within. Or at least that's what I'd like to tell myself while designing devastating weapons.
I really do feel that reasonable people need to join such organizations, though, otherwise only unreasonable people will be in them. I recently found (to my dismay) that Von Neumann argued vehemently in favor of bombing the Russians before their nuclear program could be built, and all I could think was "This isn't the type of scientist that should have a lot of influence."
I completely believe humanity can and will deal with climate change. It'll take a few wars, an anti-capitalist revolution in a first world country or two, and a massive shift towards equality and justice for poorer people, but it will happen.
Defense contracts aren't all weapons - in fact, I'd wager most aren't (by quantity, if not by dollar amount). Due to how the US allocates its budget, a large portion of its publicly funded research goes through DoD contracts. The startup I used to work at had a contract for making prototypes of multi-material 3D printers for creating medical training models (ie artificial cadavers).
Those things are also insurance against being killed. Are you supposed to just hope the bad people don't pick you? No, you invest in offense so you can have a better defense.
I know man, I know. I'm not so naive as to say that if a country was enlightened enough to disband their military, then other countries would leave them be. They would be a seen as a ripe fruit, and they would be picked.
I just wish it wasn't like this. I wish we didn't have people engaged in the business of enabling industrial scale murder. I wish it wasn't profitable. I wish the citizenry would see through the propaganda and hold their leaders to account. I wish it wasn't the nation's poorest who were sent to die for the benefit of the nation's richest.
The war machine is a rotten, gruesome system, and I acknowledge it's not going away any time soon. But the least we can do is agree not to actively contribute towards it.
Understand, there's a lot of distance between 'we don't need a military', 'we need a military to defend American soil', and what we have today.
I am strongly in the 'we only need to defend American soil' camp. I'm not sure how much that costs, but considering we're a nuclear power, we have two relatively friendly neighbors and thousands of miles of ocean between us and our nearest peer enemies, it wouldn't surprise me if we could get away with spending a miniscule fraction of the 700B we do today.
Modern warfare is much less likely to involve the nation’s poorest dying for the sake of the richest. There’s a recent article about how the average American soldier is now better educated than the average civilian. The specialist weapons we’re talking about shift the balance towards capital and away from labour in the killing production function.
Is that a good thing? I’m not so sure. The age of mass armies was also the age of democratisation. If war is waged by defence firms and brilliant technocrats, then maybe defence firms and brilliant technocrats will run the country.
I see four main tiers: 1 - 9-5 in office (business as usual), 2 - semi-remote (part of week in the office), 3 - fully remote with fixed hours, 4 - fully remote outcomes-based (no fixed hours but may also be 'on call').
The title of this article perhaps indicates a move from 1 to 3 or 4 but its content discusses 2. All the information I've seen is that business are definitely moving more to 2 than 3 or 4, though some do see this a just a first step.
Its a big difference for the future of cities as 2 is more 'coastal historic town just outside the city', 3 is more 'small town in the same part of the world' and 4 is more 'move to thailand'.
2 is still a local workforce with visas and taxation where 4 is a global workforce available anywhere with a base level of infrastructure, and little taxation for service-based business until there is greater international cooperation.
Define fixed hours? Fixed hours sucks when people live in 4 or more different timezones.
I'm trying to figure out if my current remote job is fixed hours. Nobody has ever asked me or said anything about the hours I work, but I am expected to be present for meetings, which usually occur in the middle of the day for me. Is that tier 3 or 4?
OP missed a category really. If there are any consistent sync points in the day with the whole team, that creates “core hours” where everyone is expected to be in during those, but otherwise the hours are whenever you want. Maybe call it 3.5?
Also of note: you can have in-office work with the same flexible hours schemes.
One of the teams I'm on is mostly split between US East Coast and Europe and we generally have calls ~9-11am ET which is reasonable for everyone and don't generally expect anyone to be available outside of "normal working hours." That ~6 hour delta is probably about the largest that can easily be handled without someone being up early or working late though.
In my view of the world that's closer to tier 4 than 3, but I acknowledge there's a lot of grey area between. Maybe 3 and a half. At the start of the tier 3 side (maybe I should call it 3.0) there are solid 9-5 workers who log timesheets with 8 hours per day, are expected to answer the phone between 9 and 5 but not outside, etc.
Same situation as you here. We have our standup mid-afternoon to make sure everyone can attend.
I'd say we're 4s more than 3s. I would say that an agreed upon, regular meeting doesn't dictate your set hours--just a single obligation that you all agreed to.
Going from any of these items to 4 requires an extra special leap of faith. I personally see anything short of a full 4 as essentially being office work theater.
Our company operates as a 4 tier and I've been here for going on 7 years now. We still have to get on a daily standup call at a fixed time every day, and I still have to participate in other scheduled obligations (mainly tech calls with customers), but the rest of the time is mine to allocate as I see fit.
Also, there are consequences with "no fixed hours" that lots of humans are incapable of dealing with. The amount of discipline it requires to manage this freedom is not insignificant. This said, I am not against multitasking. If you can have something rolling while you get your work done, fuckin awesome. I don't care. I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
Are you really worried about a co-worker drinking beer and dicking around instead of helping with a busted merge? Did you make a bad hire? That's the kind of hyperbole managers use to rein everyone in.
Yes, GP is a really disingenuous comment. What if it was a parent needing to take the child to the doctor at 11am on a Tuesday? Or they had taken vacation? Other than that, if hours are flexible and the team member communicated that they would be unavailable from 11am to 2pm and will make it up, then it is their right to do what they want with their time.
Better scenario is the worker is outside mowing their lawn at 11am or grocery shopping or something. They basically 'disappear' for an hour and nobody can get ahold of them.
> I am more worried about the individual lounging on their couch, halfway through a 6 pack of IPA getting in some of that game of thrones re-watch, while the rest of the team is mopping up a shitty merge to master wondering where that individual may be at 11am on a Tuesday.
I've had these scenarios in a 9-5 office job - eg. someone merged in some shit that broke migrations, CI takes forever to run so they don't catch it, the next day they are off and now I'm there touching systems I know little about just to revert my setup to a working state.
I think if you can't rely on people in your team to be professional/competent it's going to be shit no matter where you work. That being said managing flexible work hours is really hard, it's especially hard if you're bad at estimating how much is acceptable to deliver in some time frame. If you always give estimates based on what you're capable at your ideal 8 work hours you're going to sink a lot more time than 8 hours a day - especially if you allow yourself to be distracted. I try to give my estimates based on 4 productive hours per day.
I suspect that the "coastal historic town just outside the city" (or other pleasant location that is within a 1 to 2 hour drive of an urban metro office--which is often not actually in the city) is probably fairly sticky. Even if a lot of people in the US don't want to make the tradeoffs to live in an urban core, for all sorts of reasons they may want to live within striking distance of a US city as opposed to moving to some small mountain town much less a beach in Thailand.
> Economists have less insight into why remote workers might be more productive. One possibility is that they can more easily focus on tasks than in an office, where the temptation to gossip with a co-worker looms large.
Wow, how out of touch and patronizing is this? How about, it’s hard to concentrate in these cheap open-plan offices where you have to listen to every other conversation in the vicinity?
haha very much this. The upside of not getting disturbed while concentrating and having better work/life balance is not exactly one of life greatest mysteries.
This plus the "make your own schedule" organization that installs itself after the first weeks/months, and you can finally reach the peace of mind one, as an individual, needs to thrive.
That being said, I can understand the reluctance of the management, since they're basically losing control of both time and space of their teams. Which can be quite scary if you're not prepared.
But hey, managerial inertia should be fought if everyone else is happy.
At very least my office is going to have to improve my working conditions for me to go back a significant portion of time. Crowded noisy open plan space with constant interruptions aint gonna cut it any more. Give me private space (office or not), stop interrupting me, and give me my 3-monitor setup I have at home and we can talk :-)
I have 2x 27" 1440p IPS screens at home, which is just perfect for coding. The single 24" 1080p screen is not going to cut it at the office.
At home I'm also using my desktop (rysen-based + nvme) pc for work and it feels about 10x faster than the macbook air they supply (which I haven't done real work on for the last year). I'm also using a Logitech G815 + Logitech G102 with a massive mouse pad. My desk has been lowered (I've cut the legs shorter to an exact height) to a point where my knees/legs are in the air to allow blood flow. I also have an electric foot warmer for the winter months (pet heating pad in a nice cover). Other than that, nicer headphones + speakers + studio microphone and overall desk aesthetics...So I want to see them replicate my very comfortable setup that I have at home vs the office. Also having fiber at home without silly restrictions.
I have a cubicle which is much maligned in corporate buzz as "cubicle hell" but I have to say I really love it! It's big enough to do yoga inside and has high walls that you can't see over and also a sliding door. I love my cube. The ability to concentrate, take a quick meeting at your desk and take calls is so much better than open office. Also, I appreciate the ability to scratch my face or check if I have lettuce in my teeth without the entire office watching.
I strongly agree. I'm remote for the next few years because family has taken me outside a big metro area. But when I move back I'm gonna be open to working in an office, just so long as it's actually good. If I have to be a sardine in a deskfarm then I'd rather WFH; if the office has flexible spaces and enough desks and good equipment then maybe.
For everyone being compelled by their inner "Dog in the Manger" crying outsourcing to cheap countries. Outsourcing is already in play since 3 decades, but the actual salaries are kept in check by a stack of intermediaries.
Hiring remote workers directly would greatly speed up the process of salary equalisation (adjusted for COL). This in turn would put pressure on other industries in these countries and accelerate technical investments in productivit rather than relying on suply of cheap labour.
In the end after some 1-2 decaedes we'd wake up in much flatter world with perhaps reasons to not impose limits on labour mobility across borders.
> Hiring remote workers directly would greatly speed up the process of salary equalisation (adjusted for COL).
What makes you think that this adjustments for cost of living would persist? Competitive pressures are towards paying for productivity, not for cost of living.
> In the end after some 1-2 decades we'd wake up in much flatter world with perhaps reasons to not impose limits on labour mobility across borders.
I am not so sure about that. I share your hope for a flatter world, but I think that wage differentials are _not_ why people want to restrict migration. It's just a somewhat socially acceptable excuse that's sometimes given, but people will come up with other excuses as necessary.
My main evidence for this view is that migration from comparatively rich countries is not all that freer in most places. (And economically, migration from poorer countries doesn't make the receiving country poorer either, but people don't believe that.)
> What makes you think that this adjustments for cost of living would persist? Competitive pressures are towards paying for productivity, not for cost of living.
I think there is not a lot of competitive pressure, if there was, the salaries in Europe and Canada would already match the US ones.
It's another thing that the COL is quickly converging, especially in big cities. Goods already cost pretty much the same (adjusted for local taxes), services and housing vary a lot and remote work allows to arbitrage them. So in medium term you'll have an option to work from Zurich at $$$ or from anywhere at XX % less (the option I'd pick).
I have yet to see a reasonable argument for restricting migration, perhaps this would be a good topic for ASK HN? All economic arguments show free movement would lead to better labour (and capital) allocation.
Developer salaries have actually rised here in Mexico in the last 12/18 months. A recruiter mentioned to me a 30% increase all across the board. And I know Mexican Tech Leads who are making 90k USD . I myself got as hefty increase (doubled my salary) . All working here in Mexico for US companies.
> I think there is not a lot of competitive pressure, if there was, the salaries in Europe and Canada would already match the US ones.
Not necessarily, if there are productivity differences.
However, I do agree that there _not_ being a lot of competitive pressure is a plausible option. I was asking, because your comment suggested that there was some market pressure, but just exactly calibrated enough to equalize salaries but leave COL adjustments in place?
> Hiring remote workers directly would greatly speed up the process of salary equalisation (adjusted for COL).
I am very happy where I am, but if I'm asked to start going at any arbitrary rate to the office (even if only once a week), I'll give them an ultimatum.
Personal/Family life always comes before work, and I'm not risking that.
Just got approved for permanate remote last week. The thought of going back to a multi-hour commute and having my physical location dictated by a job just sounds absurd at this point. Never again.
Multi hour commute is, truly, insane. But that’s more a comment about our collective housing and transportation choices than something inherent to showing up at work.
Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared.
Even if you have great transportation (Tokyo, London, New York), the commute is still pretty brutal.
The only real "solution" that was ever presented to this problem was to create smaller garden cities that would have their own industries...this never worked out because everyone had to be in the city (perhaps coincident with more service-based economies, manufacturing did move out of big cities).
It is an extremely hard problem (and to be blunt, the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem) but remote working is a very legitimate solution...although the response of any company towards better conditions for workers is always suspicion (if the workers are happier, don't we lose...somehow?).
(An extremely nerdy comparison is with proto-industry in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution...a lot of the intermediate production in textiles was done in homes by, what we would call today, independent contractors...as the capital intensity of the textile industry increased and new technology was developed so...to put it bluntly...that you could employ children to do the work then you saw industry move into city centres and slums appear. But before this time, you had people working in their own homes and on their own machines, and it was far more decentralised...although these people were often localised geographically as there was a whole supply chain. Definitely indicates that things don't really need to be the way they are.)
>Most cities used to have all the industry located in the centre. It led to huge slums (because there was insufficient supply and massive demand) and everyone leaving the city when the slums got cleared.
I had this realization recently. Our entire society and work culture is structured around the laws of thermodynamics. In the industrial age, you had a mill or a forge, or a steam engine that was running 24/7 and necessitated high concentration of the workforce purely for reasons of thermodynamic efficiency of operating said equipment. Everyone had to "gather around the fire" so to speak because having disparate smaller works would be incredibly inefficient. In a world where information work now dominates, these constraints have become meaningless and are only perpetuated via institutional inertia.
Slum is a comment about the quality of the structures. That happens when your civilization is poor and a typical worker’s wages don’t buy much building material. Marginal structures are a thing in rural settings too, only there it’s “rustic” instead of “slum.”
Anyway, we are not that fledgling economy anymore. Contemporary high-rise apartments are really nice! Even the mass-produced 5+1s are perfectly comfortable and dignified homes.
No, it is a comment about overcrowding. The point is: there was no way to move lots of people into these areas to do work and maintain living standards. Buildings also cost labour to produce, now that society is rich, can everyone just buy infinite building materials?
Correct, the ones we have now that only rich people can buy and which exist during a shortage of housing. Assuming that this can just scale up to house millions of people makes no sense (and has never occurred anywhere, the reason why public transit systems are so important is because it has never been possible to economically build enough housing within cities).
This "assumption" is called Manhattan, where in fact 1.6 million people live in apartments, no more than a few blocks from a train that comes every few minutes. The economic conditions to reproduce this model are in several other places. The only reason it's not happening is our decision to ban it.
>the solution of most planners has been: make me emperor, I will allocate the resources...it is a huge political/social/everything problem
One thing that I've found absolutely fascinating is looking at the Soviet sphere when it comes to residential housing. A lot of housing got destroyed in WWII, and the soviets realized that the best way to house a lot of people in a hurry was to build apartment blocks. These blocks were designed to have everything one needed, shops, schools, etc, within reasonable walking distance. The commute to work was handled with public transport.
Now, I'm not saying everything was perfect, but I do find it interesting as an approach to residential design, mandating a mix of essential services within walking distance of housing is unheard of here in the US, and really only exists in cities that existed pre-car.
I think it depends on what your commute is. I find that very few people choose their location by taking commuting pleasure (and not only time) into account.
Before the pandemic, I chose to live in the countryside but at walking distance from a train station.
Coworkers always seem surprised I’m living « that far ». But now I’m equally happy to work from home or to take my refreshing 25min train trip through the countryside.
I sometimes have to endure full train, but at least it’s never in the morning. And sometimes I have to exceptionally take my car, and im hating it, but it’s rare enough to have no impact on my well-being.
25 minutes is a pretty short commute though. Especially if you can just walk to the train station.
If I were to go into our city office, I'd only have about a 5 minute drive to the train station. But between leaving some slack to park and pay, the train ride, and either the subway or a longish walk on the other end, I'm still more than 90 minutes door to door--and that's with good transport links.
You're lucky, or chose well. For me, I would have to commute 50 minutes, 35 minutes of which is by train, and I have to change once. The rest is walking and waiting time. And 50 minutes is the best case scenario. Add rain, snow and other delays and we're looking at upwards of an hour just so I can get into work.
On the other hand I have my desk at home with the coffee machine in the kitchen. I do enjoy going to the office but being forced to do it wouldn't sit well with me.
Not at liberty to post PII, but we operate many web properties you've heard of.
TBH, they've been really fantastic about everything from the very beginning of covid. I think as more large companies get on board with this, we're reaching a tipping point where the B tier organizations are starting to realize they can use remote as a powerful bargaining chip to lure talent away from FAANG.
Most companies don't need the "intensive in-person collaboration", or whatever nonsense reasoning that FAANG is using to avoid full remote. They just need skilled efficient engineers to churn out CRUD work and move Jira tickets, which can be done from anywhere with minimal interaction.
That’s one thing that I am so curious about. I’m just not sure what problems Facebook engineers have to deal with. I hear all these stories about the hiring process and people being asked to implement wildcard regex matching or something. The projects I work on are like “here’s seventy five different databases go figure out how to individualize the members from these datasets oh and data x, y, and z must be anonymized before it’s commingled.”
I think there's 2 opposing forces that will affect "us" (rich country engineers) over the coming decade.
1) An absolutely insatiable demand for software as _everything_ needs to be remote friendly and digital.
2) An equally insatiable demand to offshore engineering talent for a fraction of the cost.
I'm not sure which will have a greater effect. Technically, if the demand for software grows faster than the world's ability to educate developers, salaries might actually grow. However, there's a real chance the gold rush of super high California $300k+ software salaries is coming to an end.
Personally, I'm seeing moving into management as more attractive everytime I see an article posted here about remote work. People here are understandably dismissive of this, but it's happened before in a lot of industries.
Rationally, it's hard to see why one branch of engineering--especially in a few locations in one country today--should generally have significant compensation premiums relative to other branches of engineering. There are a lot of dynamics involved but even just talking US universities, a lot of would-be engineering majors don't have strong preferences for one specific branch of engineering. And if there's a big salary gap...
Of course, there are legit differences in demand for all sort of reasons but it's hard to imagine some equalization of demand and compensation not happening. Especially given that for programming, as opposed to computer science more broadly, the barriers of entry are lower than for engineering more broadly.
I mean, trivially speaking, the reason you might see a continued mismatch is that supply is only one factor - demand is the other. Increased compensation is a factor of both the size of the mismatch in supply and demand, as well as the willingness-to-pay on the demand side. Willingness-to-pay is largely a function of the returns on that kind of labor, which are much greater for software engineering than they are for other engineering disciplines, and those returns are increasing over time, not decreasing.
And, like... we _do_ see that the growth in CS degrees granted (broadly speaking - the most granular data I could find is "Computer and information sciences") does slightly outpace other the growth in other Engineering degrees: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d20/tables/dt20_322.10.a...
CS/CIS went from 43,066 in 2010-11 to 88,633 in 2018-19, while Engineering went from 76,356 to 126,687 over the same time period. ~106% increase vs ~66% increase. Of course, degrees granted are a lagging indicator; if you graduated in 18-19 you didn't start later than 14-15. It's possible that the rate of increased enrollment in CS has continued to itself increase, since compensation really only obviously went on a tear a couple years after that. Nonetheless I'm very bullish on the 5-10 year outlook for SWE compensation, to the extent that it's reasonable to make predictions that far out in the future.
There's no going back to the legacy reality. I don't know why some people can't seem to cope with the idea that reality is something that changes over time.
I'm already seeing the opposite. The folks who are coming back to the office are at a distinct communication advantage. This advantage compounds over time. Maybe it works for "remote only" companies, but even there, most such companies are particular business models that work well with remote (i.e software). Most companies aren't software companies.
If we're going to bet on the future, I'm betting on ~all of human history, instead of a 2-year sample of exigent circumstances. Humans are social animals.
There is literally no possible in-office benefit that can ever top never having to commute, or eliminating all time-sinks of office life and replacing them with casually doing chores, taking naps, and cuddling and sex with my partner (who also works from home) scattered throughout the day.
That's why I'm never, ever going back into an office under any circumstances. Are there drawbacks? Absolutely. You're damn right collaboration is harder over Slack than in person. But my home has benefits the office can simply never beat, benefits that vastly outweigh those of the office in terms of quality of life.
What I find offensive is the notion that workers consider a 10-25% increase in hours as commensurate with a 5% pay cut. End commuting. It's unpaid labor.
Sounds like a post from r/antiwork but I do understand your point. In fact, when I was working in London it was doing the maths on my "unpaid labour" at the time which made me quit and start my first business.
1.5 hours each way * 5 days a week = 15 hours a week
That's 780 hours a year (not including holidays/sick leave etc)
That's 32.5 24 hour days! One whole calendar month sat in my car each year.
As soon I did that maths it was only a question of time before I quit.
And here's the other side of it: you were ruining the commute for everyone causally tied to their workplace (from baristas to doctors) by adding undue stress to transport infrastructure. Then there's the impact on the environment.
Dropping your commute isn't an entirely selfish idea.
If you consider commuting as labour, you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live. Something comparable has happened in Belgium with the system of company cars. A car with fuel card is considered as a standard part of the salary package, which is advantageous from a fiscal perspective. What you get is more traffic, pollution, urban sprawl and more time wasted sitting in cars.
"you’re creating an incentive for many workers to increase the distance between where they work and where they live"
Having commuted for many many years, I literally cannot fathom how this line of thinking is even considered a reasonable counter. Do some poeple get to commute through a utopic wonderland? Have I been living/working in the wrong places all these years?
The people I know who choose to live outside the city underestimate the impact of commuting on their quality of life, and overestimate the benefits associated to living in the “countryside”. They want a backyard and a dog. Once they’re stuck in their lifestyle, they develop a blindness to alternatives. Their experience of the city is the one of a commuter – a terrible one. They end up really believing that city life has to be terrible too. They have no idea how to manage the amount of stuff sitting in their relatively cheaper house. They forget about parks and alternative means of transportation to cars.
People should realize that comfortable car-centric lifestyles are too expensive for them to afford. I’m talking from the perspective of a Western European country.
Speaking from the perspective of a US commuter, the typical commuter here is probably not living in an urban city core, but rather the outskirts or suburbs due to affordability issues. So they’re not experiencing urban city life anyways to begin with.
I live outside Manhattan, NYC, into which I and countless others commute into for work. An astounding amount of collective hours is absolutely wasted on commuting into and out of Manhattan. The public transit system here is arguably the best in the US, but still utterly horrible compared to the systems in place in many Asian cities and probably European ones too.
The average commute in the US is apparently 27 minutes one-way. That's what people have settled on when they're spending their _own_ time. If you get paid for commute time it incentivizes people to commute even longer so they can get even more square footage per dollar, or whatever they're optimizing for.
I've just gone back to an office (I changed jobs) and I'm shocked how maybe 5 out of 8 of my team choose regular office work over hybrid simply because of the free lunches and dinners.
Personally I find standing on a train for 45 minutes each way, and not being able to do small household errands on my breaks, like I can when I work from home, means my entire Mon-Fri is a cycle of sleep-eat-commute-work with no time to tend to anything.
It's a shock to the system.
That said, I switched rolls for twice the money, not 5%, and hybrid work will hopefully be something I can move to in a couple of months.
> I'm shocked how maybe 5 out of 8 of my team choose regular office work over hybrid simply because of the free lunches and dinners.
Some people I know are bachelors who don't cook (weird lifestyle, but it takes all sorts I guess) so employers with canteens are a big attraction for them.
Other people, I suspect, have reasons for getting back to the office that they're a bit shy about. Joking that you're just here for the coffee preserves your status and privacy better than saying you're back in the office because your house is tiny / your kids are uncontrollable / you struggled with mental health issues.
There are definitely people for whom having to deal with food seven days a week was a rude awakening. That said, as you note, I see people with significant commutes coming back into offices on a regular basis for reasons that are clearly not cafeteria related. (We don't have free meals or have dinner at all in my local office; I'm remote.)
As much as I'm ashamed to admit it, my diet suffered when I went totally WFH. I went from eating a healthy salad 4x a week to 'eating out of the pantry' with grocery runs every two weeks or so. You can't keep salad greens around shopping that infrequently. Granted, shopping that infrequently was a consequence of trying to limit exposure in a global pandemic, but my dietary habits are much less healthy now, lol.
I’m the opposite. Lost 20lb during WFH eating healthy meals at home with the occasional takeout cheat meal. Gained it all back once I had to return to the office and resort to eating supposedly “healthy” meals provided by the company. No time to prep at home because frankly after being punched kicked and beaten up by the 800lb gorilla that is the miserable commute I’m in no mood to do so.
Switched jobs that is 100% back to office but quadrupled my pay (and significant boost in company brand name too), otherwise I’d be disgruntled.
The commute into NYC is as miserable of an experience and a huge collective waste of time.
But a lot of my coworkers on my new team love the fact that they can eat breakfast lunch and dinner at the office for free. Then again they are all young and single.
Yes, commuting is the number one reason to work from home for me. I don't like to spend 1-2 hours a day driving back and forth just to have my ass in a chair at the office.
I went into an office and worked in an open plan yesterday - I needed to f2f a customer and some colleagues otherwise I wouldn't have been there. The customer is now pushing one day a week for workers, which won't apply to me but meant that there were a bunch of other people in the working space.
I hated it, I did very little, I had a conference call I needed to take and it was a bad experience because of the office noise. Other people were doing conference calls too. This was (I thought to myself) what life pre-pandemic was like - not very sensible.
I think remote first is more efficient for companies because they have a wider pool of candidates to select from.
I think the productivity bump during covid WFH was actually due to there being little else to do and people had not established proper work boundaries.
I still think individuals are, for the most part, more productive in the office. However, smart companies will recognise that top talent will refuse to come in every day.
> I think remote first is more efficient for companies because they have a wider pool of candidates to select from.
Its efficient for high paying companies in high COL areas. It is going to suck if you're trying to get a developer in a small town and never had to pay much before.
If another company can produce more value from the employees labor and the employee brings more money into their local community, isn't that better for both the employee and the small town? It's better than the employee having to leave the small town to get the higher salary. The only one that loses is the capital owner that could previously make more money off of the employees that would stay despite there being better opportunities elsewhere.
I work IT, fully remote since March 2020. At first, I was actually against the idea as I had never worked from home full-time before.
Went back to the office for the first time last month to meet a new exec. I could not believe how much more distracted I felt back in the office, and that experience is what 100% sold me on remote work. It is quite easy to forget just how much recreational conversation happens in an open office setting, and I find it hard to believe that people at large would naturally be more productive in that kind of environment.
"In february 2020 Americans on average spent 5% of their working hours at home. By May, as lockdowns spread, the share had soared to 60%—a trend that was mirrored in other countries."
The way I see it, it appears that over half of the people stuck in traffic every day had no business being there in the first place.
outsourcing has been going on for two decades, what's this so different other than more difficult to manage?
big company will not find individual one by one, an employee overseas is hard to certify and might steal IP then disappear so there is more risk, language barrier, management challenging, time zone difference, not a total rosy picture for me.
but yes for those really outstanding developers they will land a job with USA pay-scale easily, but will this turn into a trend for a global workforce(for ordinary developers) in a flat world remains to be seen.
Agreed. I work for a large US pharma. We tried outsourcing 10-15 years back and learned two things: 1) you will lose IP by the bucketsful if you outsource to certain countries, and 2) you will have a tough time retaining any kind of institutional memory from outsourcers since their staff moves around onto tasks for other companies or change jobs too fast to even build basic memory of your company's needs or infrastructure.
In the end, we opened offices of our own in less expensive parts pf the US and the world where wages were lower. But since then, wages have risen substantially in several of those sites, making even this strategy largely pointless. Not to mention other challenges like distributing workgroups and communications across 5 time zones, some of which are 12 hours apart from our HQ.
I'm not sure where we go next, since outsourcing and out-officing have both failed to live up to expectations. Regardless, I don't see remote work as solving these problems. Unless those wages are dirt cheap, remoting more staff will only make our past problems worse.
Is this large US pharma ludicrously profitable like many pharmaceutical companies? Why can’t they just hire employees closer to home base and pay them a better salary?
You raise some good points about IP theft and credibility. It indeed makes things harder when wanting to recruit in 2nd world countries like India or Russia where rule of law is lacking.
Funny enough, as a guy hiring in house developers deliberately and regularly, I got the impression that salaries in previously "cheap" countries are normalising to what folks earn in US/Europe - which could make offshoring less viable over time.
Employees from the same country OTOH have some tactical advantages: Same culture/language and time zone (I noticed a lot of folks care), less legal/accounting hassle, easier/cheaper to meet occasionally for workshops and stuff.
I think an Indian makes 1/10th an American engineer. A Romanian 1/5. Still a lot of normalizing before we can say things are equal. However since their cost of living is so low maybe the gap isn't that big.
Something is disrupting the software industry and might cause a drop in salaries, and some people on HN are acting like the sky is falling. This is how taxi drivers felt when Uber and Lyft came for their wages. Or how booksellers felt when Amazon ate their industry. Or how so many other people felt when we cheer for the startups that disrupt lots of other industries. HN is all about this sort of industry-shifting change.
This is not a bad thing. It's just a change that you are potentially on the wrong side of. Work out how to capitalize on it. Figure out an angle, start a company, and profit from it.
I used the shift to remote work to move company and net myself a better, fully remote role and a ~50% raise. And that's the lazy, low risk way to take advantage of it. There is a whole world of opportunity here.
Outsourcing already happened without salaries equalising. To the extent that it can be done, it has been done. For instance, I have a constant stream of people on LinkedIn wanting to sell me projects in eastern Europe and India.
I think the thing to think about is how negotiating positions change. On the face of it you'd think it's bad for Western devs because there's more competition. But it's also bad for hiring managers because there's more of them competing too. I recently had a remote offer gazumped by another one, which would not have happened in the days of "all finance jobs are in a London office".
For people in the low income countries, they have the double edged sword of low cost of living. OTOH they can live like princes on a western salary. OTOH they have to give up some of that because anyone bargaining with them knows they will share a large chunk of the excess in the form of a lower salary. You can cry "same work same pay" all you like, they will agree a lower salary themselves.
There's also a eye of the needle effect. If someone had been a FAANG or similarly hard to get role, people are going to want to pay them more, just because. Similarly if someone hasn't worked in the west and gotten paid in the west, people will negotiate lower pay for them. This is really awesome if you were a FAANG guy whose family is Indian, you'd get a top % of the world income in a middle income country. But for most of the unanointed, it's good but not great.
Yes. There's no room for current American dev salaries in a world where remote-first jobs are a norm.
Sure there are timezone differences, but EST is doable for Europe. 08:00 EST = 13:00 UTC, so working 8h in EST means 13:00-15:00 -> 21:00-23:00 in European timezones. Some people may even prefer it. Europe has a larger population of devs that's underutilized because it's dispersed among multiple countries. India is too shifted for America but doable for Europe, so the natural next step is to move work completely into a much larger European-Indian worker pool that can remotely work together.
I don't expect it to happen very fast, first part this decade, second next decade. First part is going to fully equalize dev wages between Europe and America. Second part between Europe and India.
Alternatively I may underestimate the willingness of Indian devs to live a nocturnal lifestyle for a high enough pay. In which case the global equalization of dev wages with India is going to happen during this decade.
This happening. I live in Europe and number of American companies hiring here has skyrocketed over the last 18 months. And it's great. European tech compensation is finally starting to rise. I don't think it will ever match the insanity that is the Bay Area. But a senior engineer making ~€200k total compensation while living in Germany is no longer unheard of.
Anecdotally I've heard from Indian colleagues that wages back home are also rising fast.
In the end I think this will balance out in favor of Europe/India and against the Bay Area. Which is fine by me. But I understand that the $500k/year Palo Alto people are getting nervous...
My peers in Chennai earn now in USD what I earned in 2008 (with reasonable schedules for the most part). My salary has since doubled but the gap is closing.
You do realize that what you are describing could have happened any time in the last years or decades for the same reasons but didn’t? The conditions also didn’t really change to make this more true.
Decades? Bandwidth for global scale videoconferencing didn't exist even 10 years ago, especially in poorer parts of the world. Speeds like 8Mbps/1Mbps or even 8/512kbps over ADSL were common. People also had much weaker hardware.
I think the switch to remote work started to really happen just as it actually became practical for a sufficient percentage of people, which is basically now.
People have been saying this for decades but it hasn’t come true. Remote work can’t make up for the significant challenges caused by differences in time zone and culture.
Brazil is +5h from California. That's the same as the difference between New York and London. Workable for a couple of hours out of every day, but hardly "similar timezones".
My employer keeps hiring more argentinos. It’s a few notches better than India IMO but is not without challenges. It’s still a few hours time difference and the language issues remain. Giving them well capsulated or boilerplate work seems like a slam dunk but if it’s code that we need to work with as well then it sucks.
I've been interviewing lately and what I'm seeing is that companies are indeed hiring more internationally but salaries are also significantly up. What's different is that productivity is also up so people are building billion dollar companies with 10-20 engineers. So there's less room for people that aren't top contributors but compensation for those top contributors is still very good.
Is it still called outsourcing if the work stays in the same country or state? Some people on HN probably hope this transfers jobs from high COL trendy cities to low COL remote workers 100 miles away.
Doesn’t seem to have made any downward impact on my yet, at least. If anything, my bargaining power has gone up, given the upped frequency of recruiting emails for fully remote positions.
where I work at theres a beautiful, cool and collaborative office. friendly people overall. But I much prefer work at home or whatever I want. Just need a good ISP. If they ever tell us we need to go to the office in an arbitrary frequency, then im out.
All you need to do is work with a near on-shore team or an offshore team to dispel you of any notion of remote work being the death of high salaries. Maybe domestic remote work brings salaries down within the US, but the notion that everything is going to Eastern Europe is not accurate if you've ever worked in the field with that setup.
I see a lot of the office politics players (less competent workers) are worried about their jobs going abroad.
Fear not. Your jobs will be taken by foreign (or local) workers with better skills anyway. If anything, try and become more competitive and brush up your skills.
It has been interesting to watch how the attitude of HN crowd about remote work shifted during the pandemic. It used to be a lot more hostile, now it seems like the consensus is positive to it. For people who have been working remote before the pandemic it feels like they are not alone like monks anymore. In the end, work is a verb, not a location where people happen to go. Which ever way we make it happen , it will be interesting to watch how cities will change to accomodate this new mode of living.
For me I think it boils down to how remote friendly the company is — my current place was already remote first so noticed no real difference to being 100% remote apart from not meeting up for lunch with the one other guy who lived nearby.
But in every other company I've worked, working remotely made you the poor man of the team for meetings etc. "Oh sorry that you can't see the whiteboard on the call, we just want to draw this out".
The shift during the pandemic is that everyone was now remote
Now the developed world will compete with the developing world to lower wages in the developed world. The high salaries and perks for many USA tech jobs may not last much longer.
No need for companies to pay more for premium locations / perk offices.
No need for companies to deal with the hassle of H1B visas.
From a company perspective, why pay someone in the USA $165k/year to work from home in Trendyville when an Indian engineer is $35k/year in Bangalore?
It's not like outsourcing wasn't possible before. You still have to deal with all the HR issues of hiring someone in a foreign country -- zoom does not change that. You will still need to set up at least a small office there, too.
What it might change for the outsourcing market is reducing office space if people from India can work from home, too. That would allow them to lower costs, just as US firms can lower costs for domestic workers by shedding office space. I'm not sure why those office reductions would be greater in India than in the U.S.
Beyond that, firms have been outsourcing wherever they could for the last twenty years already. Every major tech company has some offices in India already. What's left in the U.S. are those jobs that can't be transferred because productivity is more important than lowering costs. At this point, the differentiator between the 200K job and the 60K job is productivity, not geography.
Have you worked with someone in Bangalore? No offense my Bangalore homies, but I’ve only had bad experiences. Same with Bulgaria. Weird communication issues and bad work. This was especially the case in customer facing work.
Ive had better experience with people in the NL but still obvious communication issues, bad experiences with Australia and Asia.
For better or for worse(I think worse) engineering culture is heavily footed in North American language and culture.
For sure. And it works the other way too. I was consulting on project building a microfinance accounting system. All the initial target users were in India. Having the developers there made sense because they understood the context better and could easily go visit users. I found it frustrating to try to be useful from the US and the time zone differences were a giant pain, so I eventually just went there for a few weeks. Same deal for the product manager; she was US based but would go there for something like 1 week in 4.
Communication issues are inherently a two way street. Unfortunately for workers in Bangalore, Bulgaria, etc the vast majority of my customers are in the US, UK, or Canada.
Have you considered the thought that perhaps the problem could be on your end?
Especially implying that there's less of an engineering culture in a country that brought us ASML - the company behind the machines used by TSMC to produce the Apple M1?
The problem is, most companies who offshore are being cheapskates, and go bottom barrel. Then we Americans who work with them are thinking 'wow, people from country X are terrible programmers.'
But not universally true. Amazing talent exists in India for example, but they command much higher prices.
Why don't they compare to work from cheapest almost finished boot camp graduates doing freelancing work in USA... And then extend that performance to describe your average USA based developer...
Fair and interesting point. I've been a programmer for a long time, and I'd say 90% of 'bootcampers' I've encountered are similarly awful. I think we're on like our 7th interviewee now and yet to find one that can write a single function compilable code on the fly.
To answer your question, it's because most people aren't. You typically work with one or two brilliant people, a buncha midrangers, then ... those.
However, when you get folks from other countries, it's typically only because your company is trying to cut costs and hires some really cheap body shop. So we don't meet the brilliant people from other countries, and are lucky to encounter the midrangers. And they don't stick around long.
I was once so excited that a person we got from said body shop
offshore was truly brilliant. Like,
a person hired as Java but happened to know C and ASM and the inner workings of the linux kernel. He asked if he could help me with a couple (harder) things I was working on, and was amazing. As you may imagine, he stayed for about a month before moving to better things. I begged my company to poach him, but our contract forbid it.
„ workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut”
They clearly cant do the math. Commute alone costs more than 5%
For obvious reasons people who have long commutes are most vocal about always working from home, but that is just another optimization/choice you have made in your life. For me commute doesn't cost anywhere near 5% of my time, but I have also made a conscious decision to live close to my office.
Remote work is the single biggest incentive that keeps me loyal to a particular client or employer. I get to do what i did as a kid and on top i get paid for it: write code on my awesome set-up in my awesome room. I get it some may not like it, but for me this is a huge plus and a dream come true.
I always see a lot of hemming and hawing in these threads but it's impossible to underscore just what a HUGE boon remote work is for people who don't want to or can't live in Tier 1 cities like SF or NYC. My career has taken on an entirely new trajectory. Prior to the pandemic I worked at two different companies over 6 years. Since the start of the pandemic I've changed jobs 3 times and my TC has almost tripled.
There are definitely downsides to it no doubt. I'm a social person and I miss shooting the shit with coworkers and in-person interaction. But I have to laugh when I see statistics in the article like "workers view being forced to be in the office full-time as equivalent to a 5% pay cut". 5%? Are you serious? For me, being asked to come into the office = I must physically live near my employer = I take more like a 70% pay cut. For 70% I'll find another social outlet!
I was forced to torpedo a previous career because a relative got sick, and then I got sick...moving to the city wasn't a good idea but the only choice in that industry, so I had to move on (I grew up in the city in question, utter hellhole, commutes are horrendous, I would have moved because I loved the work but that was all).
Obviously, I have a biased perspective but what frustrated me wasn't the loss to my own career. I just got on with it, retrained, moved on. But the fact that I had useful skills, had spent years developing them, and the most rational thing for me to do was to literally start from zero in an industry that was more accommodating...which seems a bit silly.
So I wouldn't even frame this as a personal thing. The reason the career development opportunity is so large is because the opportunity for employers is so large...and, ofc, they are the ones resisting this.
My wife has a chronic, expensive, difficult to manage, and unpredictable health condition. Having to leave her to be in an office when I’ve been doing great work from home is a show stopper for me. And I’m always upfront about that with employers, I get some companies have an on-prem mentality and I’m respectful of that. But it doesn’t work for me, so I’m not trying to waste their time or mine. And my current employer while I regularly complain about the logistics of working in a gigantic enterprise has been very respectful of our situation and hasn’t once ever made me feel like I’m slowing down or underperforming because of it. So long as I keep making the company money and they keep paying me, neither of us cares where the other sits.
Yep, my TC is 3x what it was 2 years ago and my career feels like it's on a new trajectory as well because I now have access to a much larger, much better pool of companies to work for.
Once your office job is remote, why would your employer continue to pay you instead of somebody for 1/10 of the rate who works double the hours overseas? I think we are about to see pay rates for office employees plummet.
Having a remote-work is a blessing in disguise. It's great as you can save on the different commute, that's one of the biggest factors that can save you a lot of time.
Everyone should keep in mind that water seeks its own level. And think of this on a global scale.
I've been working remotely for almost a decade as a senior software engineer. Now, post-Covid, almost everyone realizes they can do the same.
Salaries are going to drop in the "rich world", and it's not just because people are now fleeing places like SF/SV to lower cost of living areas.
We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
I know because I've worked with them throughout various roles, both as peers and as a PM/Team Lead.
The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else.
>> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing. People vastly overestimate how talented they are and how hard the problems they are solving may be.
Not today, and not tomorrow. But if face to face communication, meetings, and the other sociable stuff goes away, it won't take long for domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from, and international management to realize they need to upskill their people in English and code quality to earn "huge" [0] salaries consistently.
[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary.
> Yep. I've said it many times here and basically anywhere I can: Clamoring for remote-only work, maximum-introvert, never fly somewhere, don't value in-person communication/meetings/etc is a dangerous game to be playing.
What's interesting is that I flew in for a meeting with my company recently, the first I've had since I've been hired.
This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.
We spent it between a conference room and at restaurants, and much of the time was spent discussing things with the larger team that were not relevant to me. So I spent that time on my laptop fixing bugs, in the conference room.
There was zero benefit to any of this outside of a solid handshake and getting to "meet people in person".
However, I have 3 meetings a week with the entire team on HD video, so I already knew exactly who I was meeting and what their mannerisms and personalities were.
That included walking through an office where people jumped out of the cubicles and offices when they saw me and said "hey! Great to finally see you in person!" without a second thought. They knew exactly who I was without having ever met me.
Is this really necessary? This was a huge waste of company money that I could have spent working.
>> This took hours upon hours of my time. Time I could have spent working.
What engineers and people on this site seem to not grasp is that "working" is not a strict definition that maps to "writing code" to management, business operations, marketing, sales... basically every non-engineering department.
If that concept starts to take root in the mind, then it becomes a bit more clear why people like the office. Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.
I don't doubt that the 10x engineer is well-represented on this site and that their worth is quite high for their work output. Lesser engineers and developers who work on glorified CRUD apps and mobile adware can easily be replaced, and the issue is that often they think they are also elite 10x engineers who have the same type of nobility and don't have to play the office game.
Time will tell if they're right, but I'm betting not. Especially since I know a lot of hiring managers exploring outsourcing during the Great Resignation and Remote Work Only craze and finding results being... quite good.
I think it's fair to say that HN can be a bit myopic. Both about this and other topics, there is a lack of understanding of the mindset of "the general population".
There can be a lot of ideas that a stated in way that makes it seem like most people would totally agree, like that "socializing at the office is obviously a chore that's a waste of time", that "work is about maximizing your programming output", or that "managers want employees back at the office is because they feel insecure about their value and don't trust their employees to get work done". But I don't think the vast majority of the workforce would necessarily agree to those ideas. As much as HN types like to make fun of MBAs and their bean-counting, there's the feeling that in their own heads the primary directive is to try to maximize the throughput of neatly parceled work units and would deride those who disagree as "time wasters".
The risk with this kind of thinking is that you end up not being nearly as objective as you think you are, and worse, you will fail to predict how things are going to happen. If you were reading Reddit during the 2016 and 2020 democratic primary; you would have been sure that Bernie was going to be the nominee. My workplace surveyed whether people want to do full-remote, hybrid, or full-office. Reading HN, you'd think the obvious top choice would have been full-remote, since most of us could actually work fully remote. As it turns out, it was not the winner. (Before saying that management fudged the numbers: The outcome was supported by my informal questioning of my coworkers as to how they voted.)
> Engineers on HN seem to be incapable of considering that the social aspect of work is important to most non-introvert non-engineers in an office and that a lot of "work" is forming bonds, developing relationships, and yes, "playing politics" to some extent.
I do this all day in private Slack communications, 1-1 video conferences, and everything else.
This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.
I'm 2+ decades in this game and I am familiar with the office. I spent 10 years driving an hour-each-way commute to spend 10+ hours in an office to help start a company with one other person. Which ended up growing to 20+ employees.
What is the purpose of "in person"? I have friends and a life outside the office. That doesn't make me an "introvert", it makes me a person who wants to spend the company's money wisely, especially against tight deadlines.
They need me writing code, or architecting a project, or leading a team.
> This "watercooler effect" myth may seem important to some, but I know my team members closely because I am talking to them all day, whether we're staring at each other face to face or not. I already know their kids are in college, or the sports teams they are interested in, or the typical company rumor mill.
That doesn't just happen. I'm glad your company/team has apparently figured it out; mine certainly hasn't.
Think about how you can make it happen directly around you, don't wait for "the company" to get it - be the agent that propagates it. If you spend the time and the energy to make it happen at least with your direct network, you'll create a competitive advantage for yourself, your team, and get a valuable set of skills.
Considering slightly broader aspect of why the work is done in the first place – to bring profits to the company – people should also factor in the creative part of work, and nonlinearity of individual contributions to that case.
It's one thing if your job is to stay at the assembly line punching holes in metal sheets 40 hours a week. And another thing if you have the capacity for improving the overall process (and profits), while still spending 10 hours punching holes part-time because it brings you joy. From management perspective, it's those 10 hours that are wasted.
Or if you're taken out of your dear assembly line and flown to the other part of the country in business class, to attend a week-long series of meeting with a customer. Somehow that ends up helping to secure a huge contract, just because your presence affected the customer's perception. From your perspective, that might look like the company has wasted a fine week of your work on useless meetings and communication. From company's perspective, just with that they have made more money than you'd bring them in a two years otherwise.
Since I was forced to work remotely due to Covid lockdowns I "waste" much more of my time in meetings now then I did when I was working on site in an office.
When there was friction involved in organizing a meeting (Needing to gather participants all in one place, book conference room, get projector working etc.) people were reluctant to call trivial meetings.
Now it feels like everyone has discovered Microsoft Teams and people feel obligated to call meetings for all manner of things that would have previously been solved by email or 'water cooler conversations'.
The volume of meetings I find myself attending now has skyrocketed compared to how often I'd be physically present in meetings when I worked in office. The only saving grace is you can mute yourself and alt-tab which is much more difficult when you are physically present at a meeting.
Some people connect better in person. I felt closer to my team, and more like friends, after having spent a few days with them in person, especially outside of a work setting. If it improves collaboration or retention in any way - maybe subconsciously I’m less pedantic in code review, friendlier in chats, more willing to do extra work to help a colleague, discussing with a team I didn’t normally talk to before, or hesitate a few weeks longer before switching companies - it’s worth it to the company.
Depends on the work, of course. But for me, software is a team sport.
My current job is 100% remote; I've never met my coworkers or my users. I love not commuting, but the lack of personal bonding and the need for all communication to be 100% intentional is a real drawback. I think it's especially limiting for people that I don't work very closely with. E.g., I can't just go hang out with users and watch them work. Which makes it much harder to build relationships where I say, "Hey, let me show you something."
So... what you like is making it harder for other people to work by forcing them to pay attention to you according to your whims. I much prefer a coworker reaching out to me on Slack and saying "When you have time, let me show you something." And then I get back to them when I've finished what I am working on.
Again, it depends on the company. For in-house software, which is quite a lot of the software out there, the people I need to show it to are not developers, but users. Given that I specified users, it seems pretty obvious we're talking about the whole company.
You clearly want other people to show empathy and try to honor the way you like to work. So I'll repeat icelander's question: Do you have empathy towards 90% of the remainder of a company who doesn't like that?
From my 20+ years of experience working the spectrum from fully remote to fully in-office - there seems to be something primal that happens when you make a real human connection with someone. In person > zoom > phone > email.
It doesn't matter much in the good times when everything is going smoothly. But when the crap hits the fan and you don't have that connection - things tend to get contentious a lot faster. If you're the only one on the team without a human connection to the rest of the team, you're set up to be the scapegoat when things go wrong. It's just human nature.
I’m doing something similar with my team in a few weeks, and I’d measure our in person value on a different scale than just what we produce in person together. I don’t know if this is naive, but I still feel like it’s important to celebrate our accomplishments together and if we have a chance to do that in person, even if velocity suffers and some money is spent, we get something out of that shared experience together that helps us grow and understand each other that is sometimes lost when we’re just on video calls.
Is it necessary? Definitely not. But I have the opportunity and I think it’s great to do, and great to plan together.
We are finishing up a major project right now. At the last zoom meeting the business lead excitedly suggested that we should all get together in real life once it is totally completed for a celebration. All of us engineers slacked each other and said that we had less than zero interest in this and wondered how we could tell the business person thanks, but no thanks. I've been in the industry for 20 years and I still don't understand the desire of business people to go get a beer together or go eat together or whatever. I do have friends I'd like to do those things with, but that is not you. Please don't make this awkward.
If I were advising you, I might note that your post is all about you.
Consider how you define yourself, and where you see your life going over the long term.
Different strengths/reservoirs of energy and motivation are needed to "make it happen" in the real world.
How can you ensure your team will be there when you need them?
The irony of writing this doesn't escape me, as I weigh the frankly-more-time-efficient-for-me working at home I have now, versus the team-efficiencies of being in the office.
> "[0] Huge salaries to them being a high-five figure salary."
CheckSalary.co.uk puts the average salary for "a programmer" in the UK at £43K, Reed.co.uk says £41k, Glassdoor says £35K, Payscale says £31K... maybe devs here should upskill in English?
Russian remote programmer here. The language is a small part, cultural difference is the most painful one. Americans never give direct negative feedback and expect this from you, for example. Many US companies hire only people from US and pay them more b/c cultural and timezone difference is another hidden cost and not every company wants to pay it - they rather pay 200k more in $. But personally for me that's fine, even miserable salary by US standards is great, and it has grown significantly in the past year thanks to covid. Some companies offer salaries close to 100k$/yr which was unreachable 5 years ago.
This is an issue not just with Russians, but with differences between mainland Europe and Anglo-Saxon culture in general (UK too). Funny enough, it gets worse the better at English you get: if you're obviously not very good at English then people tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you're reasonably good at English in such a way that it's not obvious you're not a native speaker at a glance then people tend to be less forgiving. And the whole passive-aggressive culture also means they won't actually tell you, so it can be quite hard to learn and improve.
Of course, attitudes differ wildly from individual to individual, but the average can be quite hard to work with. It took me a few years to really adjust.
The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications. There might have been a shift towards conflict-avoidance in younger generations (< 30 yo) though.
German and Dutch straightforwardness only goes one way. Try talking to them back with the same straightforward way they talk to you, and see how they react.
I use straightforwardness as a proxy for rudeness, which is what it usually is in these cases. Its like the famous "brusque New Yorker" style or "Berliner schnauze". If you talk to them the same way they talk to you they get pissed because this brusqueness is not how they talk to an equal, but rather an outsider.
> The Germans and people from eastern Europe are usually straightforward in their communications.
May be, Germans (and most Europe) are "straightforward" from an American perspective. I find Europeans with their own shade of "subtlety" which you could only learn if you were part of the culture. Otherwise, they are "subtle" and "measured" too.
Honestly, I doubt much will be considerably different for most US based companies. In SV firms, maybe, but in corporate America it will be years before they would even consider another run at mass off shoring. Lots of corporations are still dealing with the fall out of the off shore/consultant boom of the early to mid 00s.
Group video chat makes an enormous difference. And most of the early to mid 00s offshoring was to India, perhaps also places like Russia or China, where the time difference to US can make things exceedingly painful. Now, though, I've worked with many super talented developers in Central and South America where the time difference is minimal.
What seems missing from this discussion are the social connections remote workers pursue in the absence of water cooler conversations and company social events.
For many office workers, their co-workers are their main source of social interaction.
For remote workers, it's a deliberate decision to keep their social lives separate from work. They very well may be extroverts in their personal social activities.
> domestic management to realize where the cost savings could come from
Management has been looking at off-shoring whatever they can for the past decades already. Having a bigger pool of talent willing to work remotely is a boon, but most of the new influx is not from lower level countries (they already were 99% ok with full remote), and more from places with high level salaries.
Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had. Except most of the people they will find will be the ones playing the full-remote "dangerous game" you warn about
>> Management will find cheaper people, but only marginally, and not that different from the people they already had.
This is a dangerous assumption rooted in past failures. I can personally tell you that I have a lot of evidence that points to it no longer being true. Eastern European developers are good enough to do CRUD and basic work that is massively overpaid here in the US, and speak English quite well.
How do you define CRUD? Most Cloud/Web based companies we hear about are CRUD. Shopify/Github/Square/Twitter/Stripe it's all CRUD in different scales. What I mean is that 90% of their programmers write software in high level languages that talk to a database and the end product is usually some html/json.
The current "modern" web stack isn't that much easier than writing C/C++ imo, it's just different.
I am not sure what you see as past failures, in the last decade I've already seen first hand long term outsourced projects with Romanian teams and Vietnamese team, and we weren't even their main clients.
I don't think engineers in France or London (and I assume the US) are getting paid big bucks for actual basic work, that ship has long sailed IMO.
Strong disagree with that one; I think it's the exact opposite in fact. The more direct communication is, the easier it is to avoid and/or quickly clear up misunderstandings and the like.
Some email that was sent and misunderstood? Your entire project can go off-rails. People can hold grudges over something that was not intended at all. Etc. You're much more likely to catch these things early in face-to-face communication due to body language, tone of voice, etc.
Text communication is pretty hard to get right in general and text communication in a non-native language is even harder, doubly so when you're talking to a native speaker and there's an asymmetry in language skills, which there often is, even with fairly proficient non-native speakers. Add to that cultural differences on what is or isn't "appropriate" or different interpretations on various things and it can become quite tricky to communicate effectively.
I've been hearing this argument for 20 years. I was doing ASP/Perl programming while I was in high school in 2000, and I remember being told that I need to move into management because soon all the jobs would be offshored to India.
Then in 2008 when the economy crashed I had one bizdev guy tell me that pretty soon everyone was going to be able to code with these new 'no code apps' and that I was going to be a fossil and I should move into management.
Then in 2012 people talked about how many brilliant chinese programmers there were and how all the jobs were going to be outsourced to china.
I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.
> I think about this sometimes, because while I did have a successful stint as a team lead, now i'm just a senior SWE. Things have turned out pretty well so far. I've only seen salaries go up.
This is different because Covid-19 has shown to everyone that they can do their jobs remotely.
And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?
They are realizing they can, and handing this off.
I too was around in 2000, writing applications in C# beta before 1.0.
> And if they can do their jobs remotely, why can't an equally skilled engineer in a country with a cost of living 1/10th of the "rich countries" do the same?
I'm an American expat and one of the things that I quickly discovered when I left and started traveling is that skilled engineers (and designers, etc.) in countries with significantly lower costs end up figuring out how much they're worth to employers/clients in richer countries. When they do and they have enough of a track record to prove their worth, their rates go up.
So if you think you're going to take your freelance developer in the US who charges $150/hour and replace him with an equally skilled freelance web developer in, say, Brazil for $15/hour, good luck. Any such developer in the Brazil will eventually discover that he's able to command much more. Except in a few rare instances it won't be $150/hour, but when you factor in time zones, cultural differences and language, there is far less of a difference in cost than you'd think.
Anecdotally, I have a few friends that run companies in the US that have expanded their hiring to consider remote candidates outside of the US and Canada and they still struggle to find suitable candidates even though the rates they're offering are based on qualifications, not location. In other words, they're willing to pay $100+/hour to the right people no matter where they live. Good people are in demand everywhere, and they know it.
I’ve observed this as well, good workers are generally smart people and will figure out their worth.
I think people underestimate the demand for talent and think that globally we can fill that hole. We can’t, yet. Humans don’t scale well enough and eventually automation will be the real problem. (But I also think that is further away than currently advertised, but different topic.)
“Everyone remote” works right now because everyone has pre-existing relationships. Double your team with everyone having never met in person and I guarantee the cracks will start to show and the culture will suffer.
I’m dealing with a company that decided to try outsourcing for a second time starting just before covid hit and it’s just as miserable as it was the last time they tried in 2009. “But video conferencing” doesn’t bridge cultural friction and timezones.
This is not so different as one might believe. Those exact arguments about off-shoring and remote work already existed back then. Even your first argument was pretty much the same in all those other events as “has been shown that every code monkey can do their job remotely”. Turned out pretty soon that Software engineering is much more than just churning out code.
Successful off-shoring isn’t about enabling a bandwith-hungry HD cam streaming your team in 4K. Neither back then nor nowadays. The right communication tools for the job existed back then but that wasn’t the reason why it didn’t work out in 2000 or in 2009. Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers all those last years where nothing of that was a major issue but the problems aren’t primarily about tooling, protocol or bandwith.
> Management isn’t dumb and would happily off-shore to the cheapest remote workers
I've had my share of severe pushbacks with "management" over the years.
They've often been burned by shopping projects out to the lowest bidder and suddenly realize you need competent engineers to make it happen.
The problem is you can find competent engineers now across the planet for far less than what you would pay a US-based engineer, forget about whatever is going on in SF/SV.
A lot of people would like to stick their fingers in their ears and say "nah nah nah" rather than realize what is going on, but I deal with it daily.
So in 20012, when Skype was huge, why didn't this take over? It's not like it didn't happen, people have been poaching rockstars across the globe forever.
But are you really saying that it's only in 2020 that people put effort into outsourcing to cheaper foreign talent?
Or that the technology of remote work is now what makes it possible? I dispute that as well, good remote collaboration has been happening in open source for forever. People who can make it work make it work. It's not the issue and never has been.
But all big companies knew already that they can offshore, and in fact they have been doing it for decades. Intel and Microsoft were offshoring already in the 90s and perhaps even earlier. The only real "news" here is that you can have high functioning fully remote software teams. But the phenomena of offshoring has been happening for a long long time.
Just in case anyone misreads my point, I want to emphasize I've worked (and continue to work with) brilliant, great, Indian and Chinese programmers, both immigrants and remote.
It's just that good people aren't cheap, even remote ones. And they're hard to find.
Like others have said, this story has been repeated numerous times in some variation in the past and has never panned out.
I think the reason is that many people conflate "remote" with "asynchronous". Having a company go fully remote is one thing, having a company move to a culture of asynchronous work is something completely different.
Some tech companies will be able to do this, but the problems really arise for companies that have to keep "business hours" here in the US. Take a major chain store, a healthcare company, a <insert traditional buisness> software provider.
These businesses have to balance and on-shore workforce with an off-shore workforce. There will be people that work on the ground, and they will obviously have to be on-shore, so will upper management most likely. What about the other layers in the organization. From a high level it sounds simple but when you dive down into which teams support which teams and report to which managers and yada yada yada, where you draw the line all of a sudden becomes much harder and fuzzier.
Most companies that will do what you are talking about have already done so. The reason the water hasn't leveled off more to other parts of the world like you are saying is either due to existing business constraints or risk aversion to possible constraints an offshore team may impose.
Asynchronous is the real difficult part. A lot of companies already have offices in locations with good engineering talents and they usually work as a independent unit. It’s just really hard to coordinate a project when you have 0-1h of possible overlap time for meetings
I think time zones and tax laws may slow this a little. I find it a real pain to work with people whose time zones are 10 hours away from the company timezone. When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly somebody has to work late in the evening or night. I guess the companies don't care but it's very hard for the workers in the long term.
In my company it's also very difficult to hire a full time employee in another country due to all kinds of regulations and the overhead they entail.
My prediction is that in the long run a lot of companies will still prefer people who are close. Managing remote people effectively is very difficult. A lot of managers will fail doing so. And a lot of people are also not cut out for remote work and need interaction at the office.
I remember when offshoring became popular in the 90s it looked all work would go to India but this didn't happen either.
> When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly somebody has to work late in the evening or night.
On the other side of this, I feel like I'm seeing I'm seeing "leverage time zone differences to accelerate the development process" in hardware engineering job postings with increasing frequency. I can definitely see where there's an efficiency gain for heavily sequential tasks like PCB design bring-up to have teams working in shifts without anybody losing brain power by working outside of normal hours.
This time zone difference can also be an asset if your business is 24/7.
"When things need to get done quickly or a problem can only be resolved by talking directly"... and that problem occurs at night in my timezone, a team mate who's awake can deal with it with a rested head and no burnout in her or his day.
Admittedly, there are many companies who don't need 24x7 business continuity and are perfectly content with 10x5. For them, this is unnecessary complexity.
I work at a very small remote-only (purely as a result of COVID) company in the United States. We only hire people who live in our state because the burden of complying with tax and labor laws in other states just doesn’t interest us right now.
As long as we can find good enough people in our state, it’s just not worth the hassle to add more HR challenges than we have to.
Exactly. Poor countries have huge problems other than low salaries. Corruption, crime, lack of freedoms, bad infrastructure, poor investment options, etc. As much as many Americans like to think their country sucks, it’s a literal dream land for a large percentage of the world population.
Yep. We used to hire remotely in Nigeria, and that was almost always the case. The ones that we wanted to keep always got to richer countries and multiplied their prices.
yeah, no. Salaries are going to rise all over the world, especially if you talk about salaries. Is it true that a junior dev can have $240k/y in US for example? screw decades of my experience, imma be a junior dev :D
You also have to take into account that working for US company is not that desirable because of the employer culture, for example. Some of us like worker protection laws, for example, or government-mandated guaranteed vacation time or double pay for overtime or some weeks off when you have a newborn on your hands. Or be informed months in advance about your lay-off and be compensated hansomely for that (if the company isn't folding).
In the US these things are under the employers' discretion, and it's considered something amazing and impossible, like ambulance rides that don't cost more than your kidney on black market.
And lose that over 1/10th of what you guys get? Hahaha, oh wow, you're insane. If I have no guarantees, I want to be compensated accordingly! So don't get your knickers in a knot and perpetuate the "omg remote is killing workers" meme. Remote is better for everyone.
Oh and by the way, you know what protects you from %worker apocalypse reason%? UNIONS. There's a reason the bald fuck's afraid of them.
I kind of agree, especially with regards to smaller companies who maybe only have one office and struggle to hire locally. being able to recruit across the whole US, let alone the whole world, is a major game changer for them.
on the other hand, it's interesting to take note of what the big tech companies are doing. for the most part, they seem to have developed an increase tolerance for WFH, but continue to invest heavily in building new offices. not sure what that says long term.
even pre-COVID, big tech companies had offices outside the US. if you could already find enough engineers worth hiring to set up an office in brazil, how much does full remote change things? either way, talent is pretty densely clustered in the biggest cities to begin with.
Ok so we’re back to offshoring as a silver bullet. Consider me extremely skeptical having lived through the last offshoring scare.
I do think the global best engineers are about to get a big raise though.
> I do think the global best engineers are about to get a big raise though.
It really does feel like there is a gigantic competency bubble that is about to pop.
The amount of people who are willing to learn the hard systems and businesses is dwindling by the day. You think its difficult to find airline pilots and truckers? Try to find a developer with both the domain knowledge and technical skills to fix a custom piece of code in a community bank's core system that was written in 1994. Oh, and we need it fixed before close of business or our fedwire files are going to be totally fucked...
The amount of money they will have to offer to capture the appropriate talent to keep their businesses running is going to become astronomical. The executives sometimes try to take a quick path out of this hell and usually wind up with 1 additional reason they have to stay. The most common mistake is attempting a full vertical swap-out, followed by paying some firm to explain that your shit sucks by way of installing some middleware in your infrastructure and telling you things you already know.
It could have been done before COVID so it would’ve already been done. Business people aren’t dumb and if they could have offshores development, they would have (and they also have been doing this for years anyway).
So why would they hire workers in their own country? People in this thread already have said it.
Time zones, cultural business norms and understanding, native communication ability, tax and legal issues regarding employment (already annoying enough to hire employees in other states in the US for example), ability to connect with clients in the same locale, etc.
Now I’ll give you that this MIGHT shift things to a degree. I don’t think it’ll be the race to the bottom you and others are saying.
Maybe in the "rich world", but not globally :-) I've been hearing lots and lots of stories of growing salaries across places that were historically underpaid (Brazil, Portugal, Berlin, etc) - maybe we'll have a thousand gold rushes, as the water level rises to meet the "rich world" levels!
True. 2 years ago $5000/month was super rare, now it's the lowest bound for a senior role. Still nothing compared to the "rich world" but not complaining at all :)
I believe many are missing the fact that for us not in the SV-Bubble earning 30.000$/month, sure we would be happy getting the same paycheck but on the other side our wages are also rising and we are often the top-earners for senior roles in the respective country.
And they were right. Mid-income people in the rich world were the losers of globalization. There are fewer jobs now where you can buy a house and support a family by working 40 hours/week. Especially for those with no specialized skills.
The same may hit some highly-paid professionals in the future. If tech keeps making things easier while the rest of the world grows wealthier and more competitive, they may find that their skills are no longer in demand. The job is not as demanding as it used to be, and there are more people in the market capable of doing it just as well.
Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.
> Those at the top are safe, but the top is slowly getting narrower.
This has been happening for decades. It is an inherent property of technology AIG automation driving down marginal costs and increasing yields, all benefiting owners of capital or those who have the ability to help automate.
This doesn't seem to be the case in Australia. The lack of migrant workers coming into the country has made it incredibly difficult to recruit skilled employees in 'office roles' and the market is insane for pretty much every industry. This sure doesn't reflect companies having an appetite for global employees.
I've spoken to a lot of recruiters over the last year and they're primarily indicating that a hybrid 2 days in the office model is the preference.
Integrating new staff is hard at the best of times, let alone half fully-remote and half hybrid.
> We are also beginning to compete globally, far more than ever before with the ease of remote work. Qualified engineers can be found for 1/10th of the price with "near shore" companies in the "rich world".
Sounds familiar... I think you still get what you pay for.
There are certainly a lot of products where it doesn't matter at all, but in other areas you really need to be careful with what you send to the contractor and what you do in-house.
As someone that has worked remotely for the last 10 years I hate to break it to you but skill levels just aren't the same. The reason I moved from Australia to San Francisco was because there were no companies in Australia that could reasonably stretch my skillset anymore (that I wanted to work at atleast, there was local Google office and Atlassian).
I moved back when I reached a point where my skills were good enough that I could secure a job remotely due to social proof/references.
The thing people are missing here is that not everyone that is living everywhere in the world is equally good and those that are 10x as good get paid between 4-5x as much (it should be more but the world is inefficient, overpays for poor quality, underpays for high quality in many cases).
I'm not worried that increasing remote hiring will affect my compensation.
I have worked with remote developers from Poland, Romania, and Portugal, each making approx $20-50/hr, producing code of far higher quality than stuff I’ve seen from $500k/year software engineers here.
Also, their English was almost indecipherable from a native speaker.
I get the feeling as well. Mid and high tier Eastern Europeans or even Portugal are entirely different from cheapest Indians. And they likely aren't even going to try to sell those. Or if they sell it is same as USA based company. With still cheaper prices.
To be fair, 50$/hr is considered in those countries the absolute top-tier pay of almost any profession. You don’t wanna know how much a physician earns in poland or romania…
You may be right or you may be wrong, and it will depend on supply and demand as it always has. You are implying that globalization will suddenly bring top notch talent into the reach of American software companies, but hasn't that always been the case thanks to outsourcing and H1-B visas? I understand your fear as a fellow older software engineer, but I do not share your pessimism. I am much, much more afraid of technologies which will make programmers 50% more efficient than I am of foreigners depressing my wages. If you are at the lower end of the skills distribution then sure, I can understand your worry. Talented engineers don't have much to fear, however.
Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.
If anything, it might push more really smart people to start their own companies instead of working for someone else to achieve a lesser level of prosperity.
> Communication is still a gigantic issue to overcome. So is managing teams and availability during the work day.
Communication is huge but I can assure you I've worked with teams on the opposite side of the globe asynchronously without issue. The concept of "workday" can be tossed aside if we are thinking 9-5 M-F.
Global teams can adjust schedules and work effectively. I know because I've managed teams like this in very complex software projects and it has worked.
100% agree. Before my current job I worked with tons of remote teams and it was great. Even now, the majority of my interactions are with people on the west coast or offshore teams in India. My boss is in the mid west and his boss is in the south east. And so far we’re doing great.
I don’t see it. Cultural barriers and lost in translations are huge, I’m surprised anyone who’s worked with foreign teams doesn’t think so. It’s not cheap or easy to collaborate with people you have a hard time communicating with.
> The money may start flowing from the "rich world" to the "poor world" soon, no need for H1B visas or anything else.
The gold rush days may be over.
You seem to believe there are no political dynamics to this situation. On a small scale, sure. On a large scale I think you’ll find the political stability that executives in the US have come to rely on will quickly disappear. The 2016 elections were already a reflection of the general populace growing tired of offshoring jobs. When that hits the middle and upper middle class as well, shit will hit the fan globally.
It's more than that. It's one thing to offshore some shoe factory to China while keeping most of the quality jobs and R&D at home. It's another story completely if 70% of U.S tech will be off shored; the knowledge escapes, the patents, sometimes IP can be stolen etc etc. Slowly but surely the competitive edge the U.S has will disappear.I'm pretty sure there will be political objection to it and laws to make it less appealing to offshore if that is the case.
I doubt it (even though I run a dev shop w/ Vietnam based engineers). US companies will continue hiring US based engineers. And when Covid is over people will go to the office again.
Same for tech giants. No need to rent an office to compete anymore. Global small teams can form overnight, grow and shrink dynamically. Entrepreneurs paradise.
But for big tech companies at least I don't think money is really a significant concern. It's probably better for them to pay 10x for an engineer if that engineer has twice the chance of being a very strong performer than the one they could hire for 1x.
I can’t count the times how often i’ve heard this story in some variation over the decades. It never happened. You can replace Covid with any other catastrophic event, the story always read almost the same including the remote worker cliche.
that is true but there is regulation that has been set to protect that type of offshoring. realistically though, we will get to a point of one of the goals of capitalism, and that is equilibrium. whatever that looks like, i am an optimistic, (some would view it as pessimistic), but work or work as which we know it will cease to be relevant in a post human production society. nearly 8 billion people connected is new, i know we are all not connected yet, but to assume or pretend that will never happen is only operating at half consciousness and the experience it has to offer. i believe in work, it will exist for awhile but our interpretation of work will at some point change.
I'd be curious to know as well, but I'm guessing he means Europe. I used to work with other Data Scientists based in Europe and was always shocked to learn how little they got paid, usually less than 50% of american counterparts. And for work like DS where objectives are more abstract and harder to specify, Europeans have enough cultural and literal fluency to be able to fully replace someone from the US. This is in comparison to the situation as I understand it for India-based pure software development, where communication/cultural barriers requires tighter management to use the talent effectively (this is going off what I've heard, I have no personal experience here. so feel free to correct me if my understanding isn't accurate).
So previously being able to utilize offshore talent was basically a skill unto itself. Now you did two interviews with similarly skills candidates and one wants 50% less pay, they just have a british accent.
> I'd be curious to know as well, but I'm guessing he means Europe.
Other commenters have addressed this, but the term is normally used for teams within +/- the same timezone but at far lower rates for (hopefully) good engineering quality.
So if you are US EST, there are "near shore" companies in the US that will coordinate you with South American teams.
They generally have a PM in the US and developers outside.
Near-shoring usually refers to someone on the same timezone or nearby physically, like South America or Mexico for the US, or Eastern Europe for Western Europe.
In terms of European talent being paid less, yes I agree they are, but there are hidden costs in terms of taxes and compliance that means that companies would rather go to countries which promise an order of magnitude cheaper resources rather than just 50% off.
It’s corporate language for hiring in a similar timezone but less expensive country. Instead of hiring in the U.S. you put people in Mexico or South America.
Another term is “best shoring”, which is code for wherever you can find talent capable of doing the job for the least amount.
Younger people speak English but it depends what you want to do. People are friendly so they will normally try to help you out anyways.
Let me know if you need any advice:
guillermog|at|netnotion|dot|com
I wish we wouldn't allow upvoting here of articles behind a paywall, this just wastes everyone's time. And yes someone might post a link to get around the paywall but this is hurting our news industry so I cant support this as a workaround.
Give the devs some credit - maybe they know about this and are not closing the loophole because they want it to stay open? The majority of readers won't take advantage of it and those who will likely wouldn't have paid anyway.
It's not hurting the news industry... maybe. It's polluting the HN newsfeed... maybe.
I for one won't subscribe to paywalled sites i only occasionally get links to on HN or other news aggregators just because they're linked here.
Funny enough, I am subscribed to a site that gets linked on here semi regularly. Not paywalled, ads or pay for no ads/tracking. But I've been reading it longer than I've read HN.
This is really about "at home first" work rather than remote work. The prevailing model seems to be "don't come to the office unless we want you there" as opposed to "work from anywhere". I understand the reasons for why companies want you at home but local rather than remote, just saying it's very different that real remote working.
There are so many different flavors of remote (and remote-ish) work. Lots of people (especially those who don't do remote work) think of remote work as "work wherever you want, whenever you want", but in reality there are often limitations.
Employers generally care about what jurisdiction you live in so they can comply with tax law, etc. Some employers don't care where you're at as long as your long-term residence is in one of their approved jurisdictions. Some will keep tabs on your location and pay you differently depending on where you live.
Some employers mandate a set of core hours, while others limit employee home locations by time zone, wanting workers to be approximately on the same schedule.
I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
Then yeah, there's this sliding scale of hybrid remote/office work. "We're remote for now, but hope to get back to the office eventually". "We think 50/50 will be our new normal, but that's subject to change". "You can typically work from wherever you want, but we expect you to be available to come into the office for big meetings, etc".
> I've heard of some US Government workers who are allowed to work from home, but only from home. Ostensibly for cybersecurity reasons, they aren't allowed to work from hotels, cafes, airports, WeWorks, etc.
I first thought that this didn't make so much sense, because you could just use a VPN. But this might be only partly because of network insecurity. It could be more because you have so little control over your neighbors and physical environment in public and semipublic spaces, and people who know you're there can easily arrange to be nearby you in order to try shoulder-surfing or higher-tech attacks.
For example, it might be challenging to get close enough to someone's home office to carry out an attack like this, but not so difficult in comparison in a café.
I have wondered about the idea of shared rent-a-workspace, and what that does to security and regulatory compliance and how many CIOs have conniptions over it.
Would you feel OK if you called up your bank to sort out a problem with your account, and they were opening all your account details on a laptop in a coffee shop or WeWork office shared with all sorts of people? If you were a normal employee raising an issue with HR and they were doing that? If you were Apple, or high up in a company behaving like them and trying to keep projects secret and your employees were doing that?
I've never heard of USG jobs where you had to work specifically from home, but I don't doubt they exist nor that the USG would be so asinine. I'd hate the condition of having to be specifically at home. Would probably set up a VPN to house or something just out of principle and then run away to hawaii for a week (assuming odds of being randomly called in were slim but you could always claim potential covid exposure, I guess).
I just spoke to somebody today and their strategy is to hire within a geographic region. Everybody will be default remote but they will be getting the team together 4-6 times a year on site for planning and social stuff. I could see this being the strategy for a lot of small and mid size companies.
Why do the reasons for it matter? There's an office for the company and you don't actually do work there. You work remotely for the company vs in-office. The whys do not matter in the definition of you working remotely from the office do they?
"Work at your home office" culture still expects you to be in a predictable location and working predictable hours. Very similar to showing up to an office everyday.
"Remote" is closer to, "your location doesn't matter as long as you can perform your job".
Even if you’re forced to go to the office 1-2 days a week that allows you to be much wider range of housing options. A 30 minute commute 5 days a week is the equivalent of a 100 minute commute 1.5 days a week. Granted that’s still a limited area, but it can easily make the difference between a high rise and having a yard.
It partially dictates how the company communicated with its’ employees. A remote first company is going to engage with its employee base differently, invest in benefits that respect that population more and create channels that enable an optimization of that environment. A non-first organization doesn’t need to necessitate any of that. Oftentimes remote work is the lesser of two evils; the other evil being less competitive in the job market place.
"don't come to the office unless we want you there"
I work full time remote but this is the approach I would take as a company. Once your team is distributed across timezones a lot of things get really hard.
tl;dr I guess what I'm saying is that even though I'm in the office, having the choice to be there makes all the difference.
I've been going into the office a few days a week because my infant's daycare is nearby and it makes logistical sense. I am also double-vaccinated and wear a real mask with care. On most days I am the only person within 36 feet. I have repositioned myself near an air vent to take advantage of a positive pressure zone around my workspace.
I say this not to argue for the office but against it, I have personal space and I'm making this decision because its a rational one for my family and productivity and carefully mitigate my risks with my behavior. I think I'd immediately be unhappy if my employer compelled people to return, particularly before I am able to vaccinate my infant. In a giant open-plan building, it's suddenly possible to do intense focused work because it's an an appropriate occupancy level.
I think the hybrid model is just because of inertia. Working fully remote will be the norm for most software companies. Not sure about other industries.
In my experience, the office crowd generally struggles with communication. They rely on conveying the same information in a myriad of ways, over an excruciating amount of time, to get their point across. I'll admit, it is difficult to do that without the bandwidth that face-to-face provides.
When you watch effective communicators, they can write a terse comment and everyone straight up understands without any more fuss. Once you have been on that kind of team, you will never want to communicate about work any other way. Remote work is very efficient under this model.
I think everyone can be an effective communicator, but it is a learned skill. A skill those who have spent their career in an office never had to learn. Those who were recently thrust into remote work without those skills have struggled, but...
What if this forced period of remote work has tipped the scales in favour of the critical mass learning how to communicate effectively? Anecdotally, I have seen significant improvement in the formerly office-going team I have been a part of since March 2020. We have a ways to go before we match what I have witnessed earlier in my career when I was lucky enough to work with some highly effective people, but if this carries on for a sufficient amount of time I think we might just get there.
Would that it were but in my experience long meetings have been replaced with longer zoom meetings. You squeeze in more work because you're already at your desk but the communication has gone down because there's even less focus.
Of course it varies from team to team. I don't see any evidence of widespread improvement in skill. Although I think there's been some value in higher slack adoption so the barrier between offices has lowered while intra-office is worse. At least that's what I've personally seen.
I love Linux but I can think of two quite popular OSes developed by companies with centralized offices/campuses. Linux also has a lot of contributions that were written in an office, I'm sure.
All this just to say I don't think its all that valid of a argument.
Open source community has been successfully creating high quality and complex products for years without ever meeting, let alone having a shared physical space to work from.
I think you're absolutely right to bring up the importance of communication, but I'm not sure it's as simple as "that will draw people back [to the office]".
I think it will just set up a different selector for who continues to get paid well. I would guess that people who can operate well in all-remote organizations will probably continue to earn high salaries. People who can't get a handle on contributing well, consistently, for an all-remote organization will struggle to take advantage of these changes.
It's one thing to start working with an in-office team, and then continue contributing reasonably well because everyone went remote during the pandemic. It's another thing to get hired for an all-remote team, get your bearings in that organization, start to contribute well, and continue to contribute well.
I think this might go for founders as well. Some people will be able to build and lead an all-remote team. Some people will need the bulk of their people to be in an office in order to build an effective team.
Is that objectively true or do you feel it’s true? Not being snarky, but I see this viewpoint a lot and it’s never backed up with numbers. Companies are quick to cite science when sending people to WFH, but the rigor is not there when claims are made about how being in an office makes for a more effective workforce.
I agree, it's vastly more difficult to do it over call or video due to the talking over each other. Ideally that'll never happen, but it's just natural in conversations and it really kills the flow.
However, I still think we've achieved a "good enough" state and the cons are no longer enough to stop WFH.
Has the experiment of highly skilled, same-city / same time-zone, all-remote (not just some segmented piece of the team) been done before? I think you're understating the novelty (or overstating the similarity of previous experience) significantly.
India (and a lot of the rest of the 3rd world more accepting of English) could leapfrog China (and other my language only, no thanks English countries), with remote first work.
As a big fan of India, I've been waiting and hoping for them to leapfrog China.
But I realized it's not happening, because for some reason they don't seem so have the same state capacity to act. It's a bunch of individuals, thousands of little groups suspicious of each other, struggling to provide even basic infrastructure in their largest cities. And constant brain drain to the West.
I really wish India well, and hope one day they will overcome this. A democratic, friendly, yet independent minded counterweight to China would be very nice, and the Indians deserve effective governance.
You are underestimating the scale at which infrastructure is being built in India. The bureaucracy, at least at the higher levels is much faster. Having said that, I do not believe we will leapfrog but maintain consistent growth rate. China is almost 6x our economy. I hope we reach at least a third to half their GDP in 25 years given that our populations are quite similar.
> You are underestimating the scale at which infrastructure is being built in India. The bureaucracy, at least at the higher levels is much faster.
That is good news. Do you attribute this to Modi or something else? Do you think it has been institutionalized to last after the current administration leaves?
I think it’s not just shitty ISPs it’s also pretty bad corporate VPN or “security” features that really just break the internet for home working people… we encounter one network that is like a proxy of sorts… it times out all connections after like 4 minutes- a really shitty feature for voice applications
I absolutely love when the corporate middleboxes make websockets fail, webrtc fail (which is used by virtually all conferencing software), HTTP3 fail, HTTP2 fail, QUIC fail, long lived connections drop automatically
Penetration tester here. While my company was concerned about business at the beginning of the pandemic, we quickly saw a large uptick in business from corporate customers who were integrating remote employees into their new norm.
https://web.archive.org/web/20211028100825/https://www.econo...