Remote work has pros and cons--both at an organization level and at an individual level. I think that "both sides" have argued the pros and cons enough that I don't need to repeat them here.
It's clear to me that no work situation is ideal for everyone or every group.
My "selfish" point of view is that I hope that remote work takes over more and more, and that companies stop forcing workers back into the office full-time.
My personal life situation makes remote work almost a requirement if I want to continue being a software developer. I'm divorced with a young son over whom I have 50% custody. I won't move to a "tech hub" city for a job and abdicate my responsibilities as a father. Even my current job is only a 40 minute commute for me by car, and I still only go to the office once or twice per week: the days that I have to drop off or pick my son up from school won't really accommodate a 40 minute commute unless I'm only going to work a 5-6 hour day.
I count myself as very fortunate that my current work situation is with wonderful people, who all have families as well, and mostly-remote was part of my initial negotiation.
On the flip side of feeling fortunate, I have to remind myself that the company is fortunate, too. Not that I'm not humble, but I do think I'm a pretty good software dev and a generally good employee who takes pride in their work.
I guess the point of spilling out my personal life story on the internet is that I hope that companies realize that forcing on-location work is not just a choice between an employee being at home or being in the office; it may be a choice between having a good employee and not having them at all.
Yup, this is where the hypocrisy of the return to office is loud and clear.
There is one side that is unambiguously pro-family, pro-environment, pro-church involvement, pro-bowling league, pro-parents in kids lives, pro-marriage, pro-divorced child raising. As in something for each and every side’s loud and clear broadcasted preferences.
The other is pro-people in seats, pro-commercial real estate, pro-commuting, pro-certain type of manager, pro-one type of extrovert who can’t find friends outside of work.
There are clear lines here on where the wfh benefits are how it aligns with many, many stated needs for the country from each party and various stakeholders.
Edit - going to use my soapbox since this got some traction:
I’ve led individuals in-person, and fully understand how different and sometimes less-than it is to do it fully online. I’m an engineer currently, but I speak MBA and fluent in leadership. Especially for inculcating interns/new hires into an org, in person is great.
But: the above seems to be adequately accounted for via learning org culture via Slack and quarterly off sites. And the remaining negative benefits of WFH + periodic flights + learning new leadership patterns via Zoom/Slack + gentrification of the rust belt and other cheap areas seem to, far and away, no doubt about it, pale in comparison to the extensive issues of how our country is coming apart at the seams due to do family finances, environmental issues, rust belt multi decade decay, labor issues, and general personhood. WFH’s benefits seem to significantly help solve all of these problems.
There’s some delusion that a reversion to the old ways is all it’ll take to fix what’s happening. But maybe spending more times in our communities, our families, our churches, our local lunch places in town vs Chipotle, is what is needed. Or just help commercial real estate and chad the manager instead.
They're trying to get as many people to quit as possible so they don't need to do more layoffs.
I think layoffs would be way better than trying to force out one group of people, but the people at the top don't care about what's good for the company - they care about themselves.
Previously, large tech companies were interested in hoarding employees to slow competition.
Now, that is no longer a necessary strategy as the environment has changed and smaller startups have many other headwinds (difficult to raise $, etc).
So as the previous strategy is unwound there will be more pressure on employees and attrition is definitely part of the plan. A side benefit for the companies is less upward pressure of salaries and operational savings.
And pro- "not jamming everyone into unaffordable cities" which makes real estate costs for the employee untenable....while increases in remote-work enable growth or at least maintenance of current population in smaller towns and regions. If one wishes to see their own small town non-major-metro area thrive and not continue to lose population, work from home is a clear win for that goal.
Speaking of real estate costs, what really gets me about all these corporate lies about community being the goal is that these directives are more likely about corporate real estate investment.
I think it's more about local government budgets, decline of tax revenue, and everything that comes with workers (and then area small businesses) leaving en masse. The corps are implementing proxy policy because of pressure from governments panicking at what happens when WFH continues.
This is almost certainly the actual topic, I agree. And don’t disagree it’s a serious point.
I have no respect for the RTO side of the argument though bc it’s proxied by a corp using scummy arguments. It is obviously about 1950’s org culture and extroverts who buy into it (who cares if this survives), short term possibly cataclysmic decline of cities (this certainly should concern everyone), and generally rejiggering a large part of how the US works due to the WFH diaspora (this is just a slice of what the internet is doing overall, can’t fight it).
Instead of leadership, we get corps doing proxy messaging. And the last several years showed they don’t deserve to be listened to IMO. I will listen to the first public service leader or newspaper who frames it in an honest way. I was told the environment matters expect for when it’s the entire country commuting to the office.
The circle is squared by realizing what isn't sunk yet, but will be, is the tax revenues from corporate real estate and commerce lost if the city centers lack people.
Work from home decimates some of these areas if people simply aren't there any more and all the 2nd order effects of other businesses going away as well. So I think it's wrong to assume all of the pressure comes only from the corporations themselves and not also the local governments putting pressure on the corporations to to change work from home policy because otherwise their budgets are busted.
Now, this is one of those "you problems" for the local governments; workers themselves should care about their own interests and lives and none of that changes just because some city you don't want to live in is harmed by the trends. But this dynamic should be understood when discussing the issue.
I completely agree but I think there’s more to it.
Cities are concerned bc New York of the 1970’s is staring them all down bc tax revenues take a dive and the equivalent of structural unemployment is hitting city revenue models.
That said, anyone who’s lived in the main cities can likely attest to the following. These places are corporatized shells of what they once were, and what they once were is why NYC is considered cool in the first place - live music, local bars, “scenes,” that unique city approach to local community. Sometime in the 2000s, while they lost the gnarly crime, they also started to lose all that for 7/11, Chase banks, and mom and pops owned by PE. Essentially rich person playgrounds. Nyc of 2013 was a lot of fun but also more an amusement park for wealthy millennials or NYU kids cosplaying as one. Same with SF and techies.
So these cities simultaneously bemoan the loss of that character and exponential cost of living increases, but also want back all the conditions that caused both.
If Manhattan gets it’s actual artists and culture people back from outer Brooklyn or Ohio, and it takes a dive in tax revenues and a grungy NYC for a bit, that seems a good thing. NYC of the 7/11-Chase Bank height really sucked.
Respectfully, I don't really agree at all. The crime wave that these cities are willingly welcoming and not stopping, is going to create new Detroits, or St Louis, or Baltimores...but actually probably just worse.
I don't think you need to have crime, open drug use, harassment by mentally ill and homeless...all sorts of things that are pushing corporations, and workers, to simply move out of the cities, abandon projects or large retail presence (Whole Foods, Hilton San Francisco Union Square, Parc 55 etc).
I think gentrification is good, actually. Having a nice safe clean productive city with wealth and investment flowing in vs out is good actually. Having crime, degradation, and flight is bad. If law and order was established across many cities, then even in lower income neighborhoods and housing units there could be safety and stablity; it wouldn't have to come at a premium.
I mean I'm sure there is a type that likes everything you describe, but personally it just seems like nonsense to me. I'd prefer to not have harassment on public transportation or in the streets walking home at night. And if I made good money working in the city, then good for me. If the selling point going forward is, "Come to the big city..it will cost more than your smaller town, but at least we have crime and grunginess to go with it!", I think these cities and businesses and productive people that stick around there (they won't) are going to have a bad time. Part of dynamic during the era you describe is there was 0 remote work for all industries, while being centered in certain metros. Now people won't put up with that bullshit like they had to back then.
Gentrification is not the opposite of crime. If anything, it incentivizes it, because there’s a concentration of wealth surrounded by depressed, displaced and discontent people. Peak Gentrification is when only gated communities with a lot of armed guards don’t have crime, and everyone else is a hellhole. That’s how it is already in many developing countries’ rich neighborhoods.
Not really. It rapidly causes increased pressure on local LEO to increase presence while at the same time voting for policies that increase taxation and cost of living will drive the poor out of the area.
We are saying the same thing. The poor don’t dissolve in thin air. They are still there. Only with less quality of life, and with a high concentration of wealth nearby, in what used to be “their” place. Put two and two together.
For people that liked wonderland in a city vs a city, this is certainly the mindset.
That said, drugs and crime and… aren’t a forgone conclusion if NYC gets cheaper and local businesses can afford to come back and cultural folks can find places that aren’t 3k.
Both are likely to happen if nyc tanks a bit. The crime isn’t necessarily likely. A lot of other cities manage it.
I agree. Even people who live in big cities have greater flexibility in finding a job without having to uproot the family. I live in Washington DC. A few years ago, I interviewed for a job in a different country. I think it's better for employers and workers.
Not to mention the added hypocrisy that at nearly every company I've worked at, big and small, C-levels are almost never physically in the main office building. Sometimes they're traveling the globe to work on making deals, but sometimes they just want to be at home with their family, or take a semi-vacation.
If you can run a company on the go or at home, certainly I am capable of shipping quality code at home.
We had a “Company webinar” where they explained that it was impossible to do work when out of the office, so forcing everybody in was the only choice.
Of the five directors on the call, one was in the office. Three were at home. The CEO division of support employees were also exempt from the requirement.
I was once at a start up where management decided that progress was inadequate. In truth progress was inadequate, but it was a hard science problem so the amount of work done is not necessarily the main factor here. They insisted that everyone work till at least 7pm (the place had a 9am sharp start time so that amounts of a long day with dangerous chemicals and sensitive equipment - this is the equivalent of staying till 9pm for software folks who amble in at ~10:30am). In order to avoid having to stay late themselves, management adopted a rotation whereby one manager would stay late one night a week while the rest took off on time (now early). Someone found a copy of this schedule in the printer, made a few extra copies and posted them around the office which scrapped that policy. Long story short the company was never going to make it anyway.
Which is exactly what is happening. This is public science, so pretty safe for them, but from the company survey 40% of employees are planning to leave in the next two years (one of the Directors said they had probably just misunderstood the question), many have left already, they actively withdraw jobs where the candidates say they want to work remotely, but still manage to find highly paid remote-only positions for their friends.
We’re asking for half a billion from the government, I wonder how closely they will look.
On a positive note I think you can get this without being C-suite (although I also think it shouldn’t be hard to get for anybody!)
I work at an HFT firm as a C++ dev as a junior. Finance loves the office. I go in 5 days a week.
The one person that doesn’t come in at all? My boss with 15 years of experience. He wrote most of the trade engine himself, the firm would fall apart if he left.
So he can set his terms and he is home 100% of the time.
>He wrote most of the trade engine himself, the firm would fall apart if he left.
I get that he's probably good at what he did, but to be fair, if you as an organization leave such a high bus factor open, having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best and asking for trouble at worst.
Ideally good leadership should want that knowledge spread around or just not let it get to that point from the start.
> having the company's livelihood depend on one developer, you're dysfunctional at best
This is the sort of banal nonsense that seems to be obviously true on its face but bears no semblance to reality. In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides. The original team of secdb was half a dozen people. Each of them was invaluable & their code managed literally a few trillion USD of the world economy. person who wrote the proprietary graph language & compiler for that system was 1 single hotshot c++ guy on the standards committee, who also wrote a chapter in the programming pearls book. gs continues to use secdb & the firm is over 150+ years & counting. Meanwhile, the Valley startups I worked for since - they had this idea that everybody must know everything, all knowledge is diffuse etc. Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart. End result, neither the startup nor the programs we wrote lasted even a decade, even in the best case. In fact, median tenure in these places was under 2 years, whereas most east coasters are lifers.
>In fact, it illustrates the classic East coast vs Valley divides.
I don't live in the Valley neither on the East Coast, I'm from Europe which is where my vantage point for my argument lies. Maybe Valley companies can afford to do that because they pay the highest salaries in the world therefore they can always fix any problem because they can throw enough money at them.
>Lot of time taken in teaching backend programmers javascript, frontend guys system infra...all out of goodness of their heart.
That's equally dysfunctional. Reducing the bus factor doesn't mean that the front desk lady must know your codebase, it just means that there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom and doesn't sahre his knowledge with the rest of the team.
> there shouldn't be any master in the team who holds the keys to the knowledge kingdom
that's exactly what i'm disagreeing with. It sounds like a good feature on paper. In reality, it seldom is. Most east coast companies of significant size, if they do anything sufficiently complex, will have 1, sometimes 2-3 guys, who hold the keys to the kingdom & know everything. The kind of domain knowledge that cannot be transferred in kt sessions. In all the IBs I've worked at, there was always the point person who knows everything about one thing, & if he got hit by a bus, man you were in serious shit. Its just the cost of doing business in that domain, can't really derisk it by writing everything down.
otoh most Valley firms do very generic shit, with young troops recruited every so often, who stay just long enough to make the jump to the next faang. Even in the Valley, you have L8,L9s whose disappearance can cause significant damage. Its simply not possible to transfer all knowledge to rank and file. some things are just very hard. Code has a way of getting very convoluted very fast. End of the day, SWeng is a very young field. There are no rules like multiple people must know your codebase. There are actual prop funds in chicago running out of 1 big R file written by the cofounder. Whole fund runs out of a single R program! No joke. Big world out there.
I think the point you are missing here is documentation. There’s no reason to have all the bus-factor — it’s just laziness on the part of organizational structuring and lack of mandate to create quality infrastructure with good documentation, you don’t need to be a Fortune 500 to do this. Spoken as a catfish programmer who spent many years repairing the products of “rockstars” after they fucked off to wherever they went. Also if your stuff is too “complicated” to write down that’s a smell — people have documented far more complex pieces of tech than any software only shop has created look at medicine field or any mechanically engineered system. People love to make excuses about not writing stuff down, turns out you only have yourself to blame once you pull the trigger on your foot gun. Also your characterizations of the East and west coast are criminally juvenile — I’ve worked on both coasts and in Europe, sure there are a few orgs like you say all over the world, those are the ones where the contract is not worth the headache of dealing with an org that can’t tell their own asshole from a hole in the ground because “it’s in jimmys head”
I worked at a similar company before. Management don't care about that at all. We had our fundamental stone quit due to getting married and moving abroad. They just found another heavily specialized engineer and made him an obscene offer. Didn't take long for him to be on top of the systems either.
The one thing that I am still in awe is that the new engineer had his PhD in chemistry, and never attended a CS class once, but was nevertheless a world class engineer and hacker. Miss working with him.
>They just found another heavily specialized engineer and made him an obscene offer
That's unfortunately not something that most smaller companies can afford to replicate and still be alive.
If you've got unlimited money sure, everyone's replaceable as the problem boils down to having enough money to poach the next best replacement, but hiring the best of the best with guarantee they can take over the most complex codebases quickly without impacting operations, is an endeavor that can sink small companies if the bus factor hits their core.
> hypocrisy that at nearly every company I've worked at, big and small, C-levels are almost never physically in the main office building. Sometimes they're traveling the globe to work on making deals
That’s not hypocritical. To be effective in those require that they meet in person to make those deals, rather than zooming in lot a call from home or a tropical island.
It is very reasonable to expect different jobs/roles benefit from different operating modes.
> The other is pro-people in seats, pro-commercial real estate, pro-commuting, pro-certain type of manager, pro-one type of extrovert who can’t find friends outside of work.
I think it's great if everyone can work where they prefer. I miss the days when I could see my colleagues in person in the office. But on days when I work from home, I can totally see why they prefer it.
I do think that newer employees can benefit from being in an office with experienced team members. However, if this is the new way of things, then I suppose they will need to adjust.
Personally, I favor WFH for scores of reasons. That said, I am aware of the pluses (and the minuses that often cannot be clearly delineated) of having people together in locations. A fair amount of the benefits are subtle, and fairly unquantifiable. These factors balance off against often similarly subtle drawbacks. Most of this comes out of human psychology and social traits / elements of social cohesion.
To provide at least a little specificity, some examples that spring to mind:
On the plus side, you have little bits of useful information, quick answers / responses, knowing who knows something like 'where to find X', ... even being able to SEE how people look day-to-day - that colleagues seem healthy and well, and to ask them in person how they are... lots of little cues, small semi-random interactions of these types.
Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...
It's a very mixed bag.
Now, as always, people are constantly changing too. Generations replace generations. And, those who have grown up with text messages and all sorts of other channels for keeping in touch, ... well, it's another factor in how useful / important "physical presence" may or may not be.
Ultimately, though, for me, WFH has been substantially more efficient and productive most of the time. I didn't even have a long commute or some of the other hassles of many, but, cutting out the commute, transitioning between environments time, random interactions and potential for distractions (ADHD being a factor), etc., has been beneficial to all parties. I agree with your points to a very large degree ... the objective advantages to (substantially) reduced "company office presence" are generally quite clear, and are mostly to be contrasted with more subtle human / social factors including the needs of some "managers" to feel like they are "in control" and are "the employers".
The "MBAs" may have won the "round" starting in the 70s and 80s of decimating unions, but, the environment has changed yet again - including in terms of demographics in as basic a way as sheer quantity of workers available (vs. roles to be filled).
I look forward to more power returning to labor, so-to-speak, even as someone who is involved in running several businesses and operations.
> Of course, these can also be minuses to some / to some degree. I.e., the interruptions that come with semi-random interactions, digressions in conversations (of overly substantial length) about current events &/ recreational activities etc., the "talking behind the backs of others" gossip, ...
I keep thinking about the many recent theories that these "minuses" of office work were essential to the systems to maintaining an illusion of a scarcity in labor and maintaining a controlling grip on employee time inside and outside of work. As things got more automated companies knew that they didn't have 8 hours of work each day for the average employee, so they built fortifications of busy work and moats of "social life". It provided defense structures against labor asking for more time off, longer weekends, shorter work days. (In US at least, the 5-day, 40-hour workweek was never the compromise, the preferred request of Unions at the time that was established was 4-days, 20-hours which more closely resembled useful productive hours and provided better family time/family planning. The hoped-for compromise was 5-days/30-hours or 5-days/35-hours and the hard won 5-days/40-hours was the bare minimum they asked for. 5-days/40-hours is the bar line for "human exhaustion".)
Of course, in no economy would any company admit that they were concerned about being "Too Productive" nor would any MBA program overtly have courses like "How to Sabotage Productivity and Get Away With It".
But there's so many little things built up in the systems and norms and practices and rituals of "office culture" that seem to only exist to waste time, to give the appearance of work without the productive essence of it. These seem like "bugs" in the system, but they are so ubiquitous it is hard not to wonder if these didn't become accidental "features" somewhere along the line (even if we can't ascribe intent or malice to them) and why they became so ubiquitous. Especially in a time like this when so many companies seem so desperate to return to that old known to be buggy status quo. Especially in a time when many of those same companies seem adamant that the impossible and weird choice is between "layoffs" or "return to office work" or "iteratively both until 'morale improves'".
woah, I was with you until you brought chipotle into this. Hopefully we can agree that it's valuable to support your local chipotle over the financial district's chipotle, since it's also keeping people employed in their communities.
I think most people would agree that you should support the local version of a business over the financial district version because you want to keep people employed in your community, but at the same time I personally would rather support locally owned and operated restaurants over chains and franchises.
Businesses fail and are replaced with other businesses all the time, it's part of the normal flow of capitalism. Within a specific community, as businesses come and go, as long as the old one is replaced with a new one then employment opportunities are still around. Eventually something will open up that is a home run and then that store will flourish in the community, which will likely create even MORE employment opportunities and if it's a local store then a lot of that money will stay local in the hands of employees, owners, local government (taxes).
We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.
I think that information is also known to people making decisions and is why we’re seeing hybrid policies which essentially codify the pre-covid behavior of taking a WFH day. Pre-covid, having two or three company sanctioned WFH days was the dream. Let’s not forget.
So what really annoys me at this point are the holdouts still arguing for 100% fully remote positions for every employee or the employer is essentially abusing them and just wants to creep on people working in desks and watch them type. I mean come on… fully remote just doesn't work for every employee, sorry. For every “I’m more productive at home” there’s an “I need face to face interaction with other humans to effectively collaborate”. That’s life.
IMO, hybrid work policies are an incredibly positive and generous outcome of the pandemic. If you don't like even that then either become a fully remote employee after a discussion with your manager. Or go work for a place where it’s explicitly part of the policy/job/contract up front.
Mostly sick of hearing whinny parroting of the same arguments ad nauseam.
The issue is that the employees that do love hybrid/on-site also have to force everyone else to become hybrid - otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building".
That hasn't been my experience. Given the option, most the people-needers congregate at work, while the slightly more introverted types work from home.
Its not the screens during meetings that bother the extraverted ones, it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday.
> it's the lack of people nearby which sets the temperature of their workday.
This is what bothers me, why should I lose an hour+ of MY day because some people like the feeling of others around them. I don't get that time back, I don't get the money for the wear and tear on my vehicle, all so someone feels warm and cozy, unrelated to the actual productivity of the work.
Employers love to treat employees as numbers, but when employees say "Hey I'm a number, look at my productivity, don't make me participate in these rituals", people act like its childish.
I don't owe anything to my employer, because they don't owe me anything except the legal compensation for the work.
The argument is that your team’s quality of work, whether you like it or not, suffers without some amount of human interaction. You need to address that, not just parrot the personal preference to be a good little Jira closing productive remote cog and not interact with anybody at all. Not that I don't agree that companies should do a better job understanding individual productivity, but that’s not the argument.
For software, at least, whole 8-figure-equivalent software projects have been carried from ideation to delivery & maintenance, largely overseen by software developers, not managers, mostly over email and IRC (hey, look, human interaction!).
If professional managers with the power of economic incentives behind them can't match that with a remote team, holy fuck, they're terrible at their jobs, literally providing negative value.
Citing examples of successful remote projects doesn't address the argument. They're just examples. I can also say that entire multi-billion dollar companies have been built on the foundation of offices and in-person collaboration. So what?
There are clearly preferences for both styles. Choose the style you want and work at a place that can accommodate. No need to force everything to be one way or another. Why is that such a hard concept?
Right, but I was addressing the post I was responding to, not this stuff. All I needed to do for that was to demonstrate that building software products remotely with pretty damn good efficiency and effectiveness isn't actually all that hard, and I think the examples (what do you want, a law of physics?) are abundant enough to prove that pretty decisively.
In an office probably works fine too, sure, but I don't think remote needs to prove anything, in the software world. It's proven. It's very proven. Managers that can't do better than some developers self-organizing online, with the same or better tools and a budget, must be pretty bad at what they do. I'm not making the point that some of them evidently find that incredibly difficult and even impossible, they are, which seems to me like telling on themselves. Guess they're bad at their job, should let a developer do it. It's pretty clearly not rocket science or something that requires some kind of expert, since it keeps being done over and over by people who aren't professional managers. Seems to just require someone halfway competent.
Nobody has to prove anything, that's my entire point. Both stances are valid and it's a company's leadership's decision how to handle their employees and how to structure their operations.
So if a company says, "we prefer a hybrid work model", then shouting out "but look fully remote projects can work as is evidenced by all these successful ones" simply doesn't matter.
My comment (that you were responding to) was explaining that apparently there are leaders who have seen a difference in product quality, velocity, collaboration, team morale, what have you, between fully remote and pre-covid in-office work styles. Presumably they believe that bringing people together is best for their company/product/team. You simply can't argue with that, at least not generally, since it's a valid viewpoint.
Rhetorically the existence of anecdotes to the contrary does not invalidate an argument/position/viewpoint.
Rate of Jira tickets closed does not equate to "quality product". It (optimistically) means "lots of work done". The numbers you're looking for would come from user product feedback and bug reports, but it also comes subjectively from the product owner/leader's assessment of the product's performance. That's the nuance that leadership deals with every day and which we often overlook as good little Jira closing robots.
So this is all just your opinion stated as fact?
Your total lack of structural critique and reliance on relativist takes makes me wonder what your point is? Is it “do what your employer wants you to do?”
This whole topic is a relative subjective thing. If leadership/management feels like their teams' or product's performance is not what they need under whatever model they use currently, then they are at liberty to adopt whatever other model they think will make them more successful. If they choose wrong then boo hoo they failed. That's not an opinion, that's just how things work. Add liberty to dictate your own work location and collaboration habits regardless of your employment contract to the constitution if you disagree (not saying I wouldn't support that lol).
There are valid anecdotes from people being more productive working remote. And there are valid anecdotes from people feeling like remote work has take a toll on their mental health and productivity and ability to collaboratively solve problems. And there are valid anecdotes from people who feel like a balanced hybrid model is exactly what they need. And there's even data that shows hybrid and remote work does improve productivity.
The only opinion I've state as fact is the observation that there does not seem to be one perfect solution for every person and situation and team out there. The only opinion I've truly state is that people should consider compromising on their work requirements because it's silly to rehash an unresolvable argument about which work style is the ultimate global best, ad nauseam.
If I were in charge of this topic at a large company, I do believe this is one of those "every scenario is a bit different" situations and I'd advise managers to work with their teams to make the right call. But I'm not so who cares.
> otherwise, their hybrid days become "video meetings but in a different building".
The places that I and my friends worked at pre-pandemic were already like this. Meetings were held via videoconferencing even though everyone was in the office, people mostly interacted with each via chat and email, etc.
Same, and it was so dumb. The startup I worked for had an awesome office culture, with snacks, food deliveries, etc. Everybody was in the office unless and people stayed home if they needed to for something. When we got acquired by an older more corporate co, the office was terrible. Nicer looking, but white noise machines, cubicles (roomy and fancy, but still cubicles). The office was out of the way so people started wfh 2 days a week. I was working remotely from the office and ended up asking to go full remote. Also the coffee went from awesome to terrible.
It’s not hybrid vs remote. It’s fully onsite vs fully remote. Hybrid policies are a compromise that aim to give both sides ground, while acknowledging that it’s not the perfect outcome for either. To say “hybrid is forcing me back into the office when I want none of it and screw those people who want to talk to me face to face” is wholly and completely the juvenile response that indicates you truly don't understand the concept of a compromise whatsoever.
Hybrid, even 1 day a week, is still a huge blow to any WFH people who want to WFH for the benefit of living wherever they want. With hybrid, you still need to live within an hour of your office, and living anything more than 1.5 hours out is untenable for most people (which usually puts you living in the middle of nowhere anyways, which isn't the WFH goal), not to mention how most cities' suburbs continue to have 10% YoY housing cost increases.
You should 100% present the economics of the situation to your manager and advocate for your needs. Then it's a conversation between you and the company whether or not you can perform your role in a fully remote capacity, and whether or not they want to compensate you differently to have you in the office. Money tends cut out BS pretty quick.
Hybrid, even one day a week, is a compromise that enables the vast majority of what the RTO people want and almost nothing the WFH people want. Dress it up anyway you want, but there's a reason why so many recruiters hide hybrid behind the remote label until very late in the hiring process. Hybrid is simply unable to attract people who want WFH but is a favorite "we gave you 1% and we get 99%" compromise of the forced faux friends camp. No matter how many bottles of pretty sprinkles you put on a turd, it's still a turd.
That’s hyperbolic bullshit. Here I was thinking that WFH people didn't want to commute unnecessarily into the office, be able to work undistracted at home in their flow state, be home to meet the handyman in the afternoon if needed or do an errand that has to happen during business hours, eat lunch with their kids, etc. How does 1 day a week in the office kill all that, exactly?
The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person.
> The only thing 1 day a week RTO kills is the “work from Bozeman” camp, which affords zero to people who want to collab in person.
No I didn't. That's called a remote job not WFH. If work from wherever the fuck I want is important to you then go work for a remote company or convince the one you work at that your roll can be performed remote, from wherever the fuck you want. Nobody is arguing against that.
How does that work when I need to employ you to come weld two pieces of metal together in the factory I own, or take care of the sick patient in a bed in my hospital? You clearly haven't given a fraction of a second’s thought to this topic you’re just blurting out pro-100%-remote-work quips.
Is this a joke response? The law, as it does now for other cases, would differentiate work that can be done remotely and work that can be done on site.
Did you think my suggestion meant that e.g. waiters and sailors would also work from home?
>You clearly haven't given a fraction of a second’s thought to this topic
How would the law distinguish what jobs can and can't be done remotely? It's not objective. You've got to be kidding me if you think the law can tell a business whether an employee can perform their duties remotely or not... LOL I'm trying to even imagine the wording... please provide some example prose.
Anyway... you're deeply gravely missing the entire nuance: management/leadership at Google is arguing that "the job" of a general employee expected to be a collaborative team member can't be done completely remotely to a quality level or at a velocity that is acceptable for their business. Sure there are exceptions that the business decides are okay, like that ops guy working 3rd shift from Seychelles who isn't building product and closes all his incidents in an acceptable time window that meets SLAs, he's allowed. But they are exceptions, not the rule.
>How would the law distinguish what jobs can and can't be done remotely? It's not objective.
The law doesn't just handle objectively measurable things. It's not a computer algorithm, and it has to apply to society, where things are not always black and white. So, the law has differentiated such things since the dawn of man, it's nothing new. Examples of such cases would be obscenity laws, defamation laws, fair use judgements, personal/psychological damage compensation, etc, where there are general legal guidelines and court/jury judgment if further required. There are tons of other such examples in all legal domains.
>You've got to be kidding me if you think the law can tell a business whether an employee can perform their duties remotely or not... LOL I'm trying to even imagine the wording... please provide some example prose.
The juvenile "LOL" approach isn't very conducive to proper conversation. Just saying.
In any case, the law could give general guidelines, and also list some unambiguous remote-capable job roles, and the rest could be left to per industry evaluation, and, if it comes to that, case law.
"In order to promote workplace flexibility and adaptability in the modern economy, this law establishes a distinction between remote-capable jobs and location-dependent jobs. Remote-capable jobs are those positions that can be performed effectively and efficiently without the physical presence of the employee at a specific worksite. Such jobs may include roles in software development, content creation, customer service, and other knowledge-based occupations. On the other hand, location-dependent jobs are those roles that necessitate the employee's physical presence at a designated workplace due to the nature of the tasks involved, such as healthcare professionals, emergency responders, construction workers, and other hands-on occupations. Employers shall assess job functions and determine the suitability of remote work based on factors such as operational requirements, employee productivity, and the preservation of essential services. This law aims to facilitate remote work opportunities while ensuring that critical functions requiring local presence are duly addressed."
>management/leadership at Google is arguing that "the job" of a general employee expected to be a collaborative team member can't be done completely remotely to a quality level or at a velocity that is acceptable for their business.
They can argue whatever they want.
If employers were left on their own devices they'd also argue that people should work 12 hours a day, that paid overtime is detrimental to their business, that child labour is fine, that their business don't need to provide safety standards and work accidents should be pinned into the workers being "careless", that they don't need to hire women in executive roles because they're less competent and have impaired judgment "once a month", and a whole lot more.
In fact, they have argued, and practiced all of the above, before labour laws (that they fought against vehemently), had them begrudgingly accept them.
What is "acceptable for their business", based on their own judgement, shouldn't constrain what is accetaptable or even best practice for society, the environment, and so on.
No one but management is forcing anyone to do anything. If I do well in person, then as a colleague I need to respect that other people might do well remote, and vice versa.
Sure, but these hybrid policies aren't just the result of management wanting to see busybodies typing, but people that still bother to come into the office making small talk like "yeah it's always empty" or "that onsite day was nice, wish my team was here more often". They likely still respect everyone's preference, but management needs to keep everyone happy, so hybrid is the compromise and it allows management to justify their multiple-million-dollar commercial real-estate investments.
That’s why hybrid policies represent a compromise. If you’re more than 2 years old you understand the meaning of compromise. Nobody get’s exactly what they want, but the outcome aims to please both sides by offering affordances in both directions.
Sorry that wasn't meant to be directed at you. I was responding to the thread of discussion. I think we agree, and I was just reiterating that because there are two sides people need to compromise. I was also expressing frustration that there are still people chiming in to the tune of "well I want to be at home all day every day and hybrid is bad for me so RTO and anybody who supports it is full of shit" without any ability to, well, compromise.
I'm not fully convinced that there are two strong camps, on the merits. If there were, you wouldn't have to have policies requiring one over the other, as you would let it win on the merits.
That said, I'm also not convinced remote is amazing. I do wish they would move to more performance oriented metrics on who they are allowing to work from where. This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring. If you just want people in the office, surely you have a reason for that.
This is especially true for a company that famously lauds OKRs. If they work as well as we've been assured that they do over the years, make that your push. Don't focus on "percent in the office X days a week."
> This is akin to having school focus on attendance instead of test scoring
This example is funny because tying school performance to standardized test scores has been a disaster that makes overall schooling less effective in favor of "teach the test".
More numeric performance metrics would have people work the metrics, not do the work effectively. IE back when programmers were measured by LOC, so they wrote senselessly verbose code to play the metric.
Oh, believe me, I picked that somewhat on purpose. Like I said, I'm not convinced that remote is amazing. I'm also far from convinced that OKRs are. Google just has the curse that, in a rising tide, all measures go up. Similarly, in a falling one...
>If there were, you wouldn't have to have policies requiring one over the other, as you would let it win on the merits.
These policies both have costs (financial, talent-wise, administratively depending on what state/country you are in, etc.), and while it sounds ideal, it's not always a good idea to let an employee "do whatever they want". That's a less talked about way on how you cause office clashes. Sometimes the best way to settle those disputes before they start is to lay a foot down say "we are doing X", and inevitably let those who feel strongly walk.
Ideally while clearly explaining your rationale. Because you're communicating with fellow adults, not wrangling kids into a playpen.
That's the part companies forget, and reading fake platitudes or empty statemes like this memo don't make me feel confident either way, regardless on how I feel about remote vs. office.
No, if your rationale is "we are still paying for this building and must use it", just say it. If it's "we don't need an office anymore and it's saved costs", say that.
Well that’s why hybrid is a compromise. I don't think it’s totally fair to say “well covid made things WFH so a hybrid policy is requiring RTO”. This thread is about Google’s hybrid policy not company X requiring 5 day RTO or GTFO. That would be a different discussion. Otherwise totally agree about doing more metrics based evaluation of performance, teams, and roles.
No? This article is clearly largely about a memo getting upset that folks aren't making it in the required 3 days a week.
Yes, it mentions fully remote people with the hopes to get them to switch off fully remote. But the meat, as it were, is in the reminder to everyone else that absence factors into performance reviews. That is, they don't measure you by OKRs, but by attendance. (I can see an argument that it is "in addition to OKRs," but that doesn't change my challenge here. If those work, why have attendance?)
What about the part where you’re still remote for two days? Hybrid means in office part of the time, WFH the other part of the time. Yes you have to go into the office in a hybrid situation, but not 5 days a week, only 3. That’s my point, you shouldn’t complain “waaa hybrid makes me RTO” while conveniently ignoring that you also get non-RTO days… well unless you’re a completely uncompromising twig.
I mean... sure? Hard to ignore that they set the tone with "we are embracing work from home" to "we are no longer classifying folks as fully remote, at large" to "and everyone else is required to be in an office 3 days a week."
I'm reminded of the scene, "I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further."
Dude, they're not the same thing. IDK what else to tell you. If you weren't a fully remote employee and you took liberties during covid then that time has come to an end. Google doesn't agree that you are a fully remote employee by default anymore. So convince them that you are or take a remote job where you can have what you want.
Your own phrasing cuts to it, though. For a time, they did agree that folks were fully remote /by default./ I'd argue it was more /by necessity/, but they set the tone. To reneg on that is on terms they set.
And again, I'm actually not fully pro-remote. But this is a bed they made.
I am not a Google employee so I don't know the details. As far as I'm aware they never said "you're fully remote now don't worry about coming back to the office" and now are reneging. If they said that and are reneging then I guess I understand the frustration a lot more and agree people have grounds to feel slighted. Still I think the best recourse is a direct conversation with your manager rather than trying to convince everyone on HN that fully-remote is the only reasonable stance one can take in the software engineering field (royal you, here, not specifically directed at you).
Certainly fair. I'm in the same boat. Looking from the outside. I was at another large company that was a lot heavier on the messaging, and it definitely feels like a reneg.
Remote first, with appropriate hubs in geographic locations as needed. It worked for me pre pandemic and I used everything in between fully remote and in office (I had no need to relocate away from the office), it would happily work for me in a post-pandemic world too, as long as any hybrid arrangements are decided by individual teams’ needs and team members’ individual preferences and flexibilities (or lack of, as expected in life).
>We don't need to rehash each side. Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.
Perhaps having a goal of "optimizing productivity" is the problem.
If employeers were allowed to drive this to its ultimate conclusion they would adopt forced servitude as the maximum productivity setup (which, they historically, and even today in many places, have adopted).
I should have included product quality explicitly in the list of things to optimize, my bad. That's, at least, what I was trying to communicate I wrote the comment.
But also, quality and productivity are not totally separate, let's not be coy. If you can't collaborate effectively then both productivity and quality can take hits.
Most companies operate (whether working from office or WFH) as not giving a flying fuck about product quality. There are so many corners cut, stuff added to increase the bottom line with shady crap to the detriment of the end product (and the user experience), blatant lack of passion for the result and so on.
If the product suffers, it's not because they're working for home. Microsoft, Adobe, Apple, or the famous old examples everybody loved to have Avid and Quark,
have made no end of crap releases, or crapped on their priorly good products, while strictly working from an office.
And that's with product oriented companies - corporate and government software is, of course, much much worse.
Still, why optimize for product quality either? It's a bottomless pit. We should optimize for a decent product (that would already be an improvement), and work-life balance. Work is 1/3+ of daily life, and people's time is not something people should be forced to sacrifice (by piling up forced relocation or commuting time, open plan or cublicle farm environments, and lack of day contact with kids, spouses, ability to drop the kids to school or handle some chore over the week, and so on).
This is where I get hung up every time. As a software engineer, “I cannot collaborate with someone unless I am physically next to their body” is just not a tenable position.
We collaborate through reviews on PRs, virtual documents, links, search queries, and yes, conversations. But this has all happened in virtual settings for a long long time, and almost can’t work any other way.
It depends on the type of work. No, I've never needed a face-to-ace with a PR, and it'd be less efficient to do it face to face because it often needs more than 1-2 people in office looking at it.
But I have noticed that it's much harder to brainstorm ideas remotely. Where you want fast back and forth, everyone to speak their minds, notes to jot down. These aren't as efficient to do on a computer, at least not for my generation raised between tech and analog.
I worked for a company pre-pandemic where I had more or less the best of all worlds. The company was already split between East Coast and West Coast, so meetings from conference rooms in the office were often the same quality as meetings from anywhere remotely, since Google Meet had always been there to connect both coasts.
As a result, we never needed to have specific days "in office" or "you can do what you want"; as long as you could attend the meeting, you could be wherever you needed to be. I found just as much value on days in the office as days elsewhere, but the biggest value was that every day it was my choice.
Then the pandemic hit and we lost the office, and naturally I discovered the downsides of being permanently remote.
Today's "compromise" of forced "in-office" and "do what you want" schedule doesn't strike me as inducing the best collaboration based on what individual teams and groups need.
> Obviously there are two strong camps, each with merit, for how to optimize productivity.
Hopefully, there will be companies that are in one camp or the other as well. That seems to be the only way to create a workplace that is beneficial to everyone.
Google demanding RTO, for instance, doesn't impact me because I have negative interest in ever working for Google. However, I still retain hope that the sorts of companies I am interested in working for will have a working environment that suits me.
I think for me it's more that the pros/cons need to be stated clearly and evaluated honestly, which I sometimes feel they aren't.
Recently a company I work with (but not for) announced a similar policy: everybody is required to be back in the office. Through informal conversations with two senior managers I know that this is effectively just a fishing expedition to reduce the amount of people that will be involuntarily laid off in the next round (here in Europe it's much less costly if they walk away on their own). Aside from the fact that this is a terrible way to make a selection (you will lose good employees), I find it also immoral to use a list of bullet points to justify the move when there is a totally different reason behind it.
During COVID I also saw a lot of middle managers nervously squeaking through the pandemic ('maybe all of those meetings COULD have been and email' syndrome), and now that it's possible to bring people back to the office there is lots of rationalization about why it's good and/or necessary to do so. When in reality their job depends on it, not the company's success.
I think if commute time was even partially employer-paid we would see a much more honest evaluation of the pros and cons of remote vs office-based work.
> I find it also immoral to use a list of bullet points to justify the move when there is a totally different reason behind it.
Well, if the actual intent is to be left with a smaller number of more obedient people who'd bend over for the company and do things without asking questions, putting a bogus reason out is an effective way to accomplish the goal.
> I think if commute time was even partially employer-paid we would see a much more honest evaluation of the pros and cons of remote vs office-based work.
Companies do have to pay for their office space. My employer did not review our lease during the pandemic. Recently, we got out of the other lease in the region and consolidated both offices into one smaller office for people who want to work in an office. We're saving a ton of money.
My selfish POV is that there should be companies that are remote, and companies that are in person, and employees should have options in terms of the type of work experience they'd like to choose. This may even lower compensation so it will be a win for the employers, because employees will choose to work for you for reasons beyond compensation.
Seems like the way to go, but instead these companies are all copying each other.
Isn't this sort-of happening, just with the differentiation not being among Big Tech but between them and everyone else?
Big Tech is forcing people to put butts in seats; smaller companies that can't afford to pay that much are embracing remote work as a competitive advantage in the labor market.
At least that's what I'd expect, and it fits with how a lot of my friends are working. OTOH I have seen a lot of companies advertising for in-office or close-to-office (keeping their RTO powder dry) despite obviously having no chance of competing on compensation.
I want to blame that on the recent mass layoffs, hirer's market and all that, but I'm not sure -- maybe they're filtering out employees with high self-regard on purpose?
If I were hiring I'd probably look for "insists on remote" as a positive signal at least for devs. Values things other than cash, willing to have work output measured, can take late-night meetings sometimes, won't be poached by FAANG -- what's not to like for a manager?
I think this POV is the _opposite_ of selfish! It's advocating for a system in which everyone gets to individually decide for themselves what working environment they want. Instead of the pro-remote or pro-office crowd trying to impose their preferred working environment on the whole industry.
> Seems like the way to go, but instead these companies are all copying each other.
That's the problem, IMO. Tech companies, down to the smallest start-ups, love to cargo-cult the big guys. If Google, Apple, and Twitter do something, pretty much the whole industry will follow suit without needing much more justification than "Well, Google does it and they're amazingly successful. Therefore, we should do it."
So, I'm very disappointed at how many of the big tech companies are forcing people back into the office.
We're doing something in between here at Meta by generally pushing people to choose one or the other but allowing both.
The company just announced a 3 days per week RTO policy for those assigned to an office, but employees are free to go remote if that's what they prefer. The main thing you give up by going remote is an assigned desk in the office -- if you live nearby you can still drop in to an office whenever you like.
I think it should be employee based not company based. If you're in the office you don't have a real good reason to discriminate against someone working remotely. If you need the person you'll arrange a meeting or call them regardless, how does it work with clients? If they're working remote, do you just decline their business? If you're discriminating against a colleague on that basis, you're actively chosing to do so. If you're subconsciously doing it, you're probably doing it for other factors, which you should be consciously considering and mitigating.
If a company decides to have an in-office culture and policies, that only works if they can decide it per-company not per-employee. If that means you and I don't want to work there as a result, so be it, but IMO we shouldn't be able to decide to work there and to be remote.
I am also selfish with regards to remote work. I don't have any kids, but to me remote work just simply works and makes sense. Having said that, there is an argument for in-person collaboration to an extent. But as a software engineer, I loathe going back to the office and refuse to under almost any circumstance.
If an employer wants me to return to the office, I'm very direct in communicating the additional cost to them and salary bump for me. My go-to response to any request to return to office is "I require a 40% salary increase or no bueno" and thus far they have backed down.
Back when I was working in the office, I had co-workers who liked to lounge around my desk making small talk, asking questions, and generally trying to be friendly and social, which I understand why they would, but it interrupts my "flow state" and leaves me more disgruntled than anything.
Work is work to me, and I don't care to socialize nor is it critical in my current job. Not hating on others who feel anything to the contrary, it's simply not my cup o' tea.
The benefits of WFH greatly surpass any conceivable benefit of having to return to the office, for me. And with my current employers, I cannot see any benefit of it for them.
Corporatism needs a wakeup call and it's finally receiving just a taste of it. Considering salaries are repressed and have been for more than 20 years, it's the very least of what we, as workers/minions/peasants, deserve (at least in the U.S.)
> I think that "both sides" have argued the pros and cons enough that I don't need to repeat them here.
Then proceeds to repeat the arguments of one side.
Everyone understands easily how remote is more comfortable for individuals; all the benefits have been repeat times and times providing examples of thousands of individual situation in which being home is better than being in an office. This is example 15768984.
The question that execs are trying to answer is "are we stronger with an in-office team", knowing they will cut themselves from the "ragneses" in the talent market, but looking more attractive to the people who prefer in-office work; or "are we stronger with a distributed team of ragneses", and having other people who prefer presential offices flock to other companies. It looks like the GAFAs (and many other) are choosing the first option and are fine not having access to some remote-only talents. Others are sticking to their remote-first (or remote-only) culture.
Many of the bigger companies seem to go on the same direction; maybe that decision is based on internal data they have gathered showing that office-first teams are more efficient and performant. Or maybe it's based of sheer traditional management backwards reactionary push. If that's the case; we should soon see fully remote companies starting to take the lead in terms of growth, IPO, successful exits etc since they have been able to identify a better collaboration model that yields better results for less costs.
> They will try to retain good employees. They realize the benefits of remote workers.
You have two wrong assumptions here - one is that all the good employees want remote. That's not true. Good people also like offices with some flexibility to work remotely whenever they choose. Second assumption is that companies big and small won't make exceptions for their superstars. That's not true neither. A lot of companies are forcing their policies on their cogs while bending over backwards for their superstars.
I did not mean all good employees want remote work. Why would I say that…
I just meant relatively, compared to big companies; smaller companies will make more exceptions to retain folks. And smaller companies realize and value the pros of remote workers more, like savings in office space expenses.
This all feels like screaming because companies are bad at adapting.
I don't think 100% full time remote is going to work for all cases/all positions, but I am pretty sure that the companies that are going to be above the curve the coming years will figure out the best way to handle a hybrid environment.
"Everyone in/Everyone out" is so cludgy when we've got the tools to customize better, and the ones that do will probably attract more talent. Obviously there are issues when places like FAANG are resistant because they can pay the most and set the tone, but there's enough advantages to getting this right it'll filter in eventually.
I have always thought most resistance from FAANG companies was more about preventing leaks of their property than actual issues with productivity. Am I mistaken?
I remember a big tech worker telling me something along the lines of "If you pulled out a camera here in the office, you would be quickly removed by security". Something of that level of locked down would be impossible to enforce with remote work.
Yeah. I work for Google, I'm remote. I much prefer being in person with my team in Mountain View but the Bay Area is such a fucking nightmare for families that it's simply not worth it.
Your bottom line is true for me in a different way. I am about to move from NY to TX. My employer only has offices on the west coast. I like my job, and AFAICT they're quite happy with me...but I'm definitely not moving my family to the Bay Area.
A 40-minute drive to work sounds absolutely miserable. Is there a high anti-office sentiment in areas with decent density where most people can get to "the office" with a quick ride on a train? Sometimes I think "anti-office" is a lot more "anti-soul-crushing-commute".
I'm glad to see more discussion around remote/in-office work being a preference. I hate wfh and feeling stuck in the house all the time. However, I don't expect that everyone else must match me. I think it is good that some companies are landing on both sides of the fence and people will weigh their office preference as another part of their comp package. Companies will have to decide how they want to compete. They will have to decide on what exceptions they are willing to make to attract talent and that seems good for everyone.
My only real problem with RTO is that many of these companies want to shove us in bull-pen style offices. I won't return to that. Give me a damn cubicle.
It is more along the lines of: we are not all the same. We are all wired in different ways. Different things make us tick. I don't particularly enjoy social interactions. Frankly, I am drained by them, but to others those same draining experiences are a source of energy. I assume there is some sort of solution, but right now it remains a tug of war mixed in with a weird game of chicken.
In other words, there should be a way to accommodate everyone. In fact, there is one. We just seem to want to do it.
It's a pain when someone in my teams meetings is in the office because of all the noise in the background. This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there.
"Communication" can also mean getting distracted or drawn into irrelevant discussion or being continuously interrupted by people wanting something.
I think it's quite ridiculous to claim to value personal presence in an age where I'm working with people all day who are in other countries and other offices - even down the hall - and that's all happening by chat and email and teams meetings. I really think it's about the way some people manage lazily by looking to see if you're typing or not instead of looking at results and understanding the work.
It's nice to meet people in person once or twice but I don't need to see any of them once a week or once a month.
I only manage 3 people but I have to work with a lot of people to get things done and have to understand their personalities and points of view and what they're doing up to a point. I can't come up with a reason why I would want to be able to look over their shoulder.
IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results. You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question. You also lose an unbelievable amount for anyone who lacks experience - training is AWFUL remote. Not even close.
It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.
As someone who's been working remotely (or nomadically) for nearly a couple dozen years or so, I firmly subscribe to the notion that the sentence "hell is other people" was coined because someone kept interrupting the author, or because they had to share a workshop (or an open space office) with apprentices, bolstering peers or customers barging in unannounced.
You can have spontaneous conversations in a number of ways, but anything that requires focus work suffers greatly because of the insistence in shoving people together without providing suitable spaces for isolated work--which is why I would, back in the 2000s, frequently grab the brick that passed as a laptop and find an empty meeting room to work in, and later (thanks to GPRS and 3G, not even Wi-Fi) "upgraded" to sitting in the cafeteria or a lounge for two hour stints every day just to get work done.
Yes, you need to coordinate with people. And yes, you need to manage them. But doing either by having them within earshot and "not knowing" what they are up to are truly the hallmarks of incompetent managers, or of a broken company culture. Set up office hours. Rotations. Anything but mandatory RTO at arbitrary days that will force people to spend 4h a day in a commute, be unable to pick up their kids from school, or aid elderly relatives (or friends).
I sincerely hope that I do not have to go back to an open-space office ever again, and that my trips to the office are driven by actual need rather than management insecurities.
I agree with this in a sense. Every time someone talks about how they've been able to make remote work and how every company should as well, the thing that pops into my head is "well why doesn't the company just completely change their culture".
Can companies to this, yes. Should they, (opinion). Can it be understandable why a company might be resistant to completely changing their culture?
Take your example of "incompetent managers". How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills? How long would it take them to backfill those managers and what's the cost to the business in the meantime?
> How many managers do you think a google/amazon type company would need to fire during a transition to a fully remote culture because they are unable to learn the required skills?
Parent's comment is mildly revealing in a sense. Management does not want to learn new things. It already thinks it has all the tools needed. It had them ready and polished since 50s and they work so well. So well. And them youngins come in and upset applecart with all that remote work. Stupid pandemic ruined managing.
FWIW, I am exaggerating, but only slightly. I did overhear an actual comment from a manager that they had to 'toss out their toolset' to deal with remote.
However, at a tech company that's targeting an ecosystem that changes every few years, managers that are unwilling / unable to learn new stuff are incredibly damaging to morale and to the business as a whole.
If Google was making widgets that were designed in the 1950's, and have undergone zero customer-visible revisions, then yeah, they'd need conservative managers that can keep cutting costs / defect rates a few percent every year while investing as little as possible in evolving the core business.
However, Google isn't there yet. They're facing an existential threat, where Internet search is going to be lights-out in a few years thanks to LLMs, their primary revenue sources are being outlawed in large swaths of the first world, and they are a distant third in public cloud, which is the thing that's driving economies of scale for server-side compute (meaning they're dangerously close to falling on to the wrong exponential curve when it comes to datacenter hardware innovation).
If a manager can't figure out how to manage via zoom + slack, I seriously doubt they'll be able to figure out how to incorporate non-human intelligence into their team workflows while also pivoting from surveillance capitalism to a privacy-respecting revenue model, and also becoming customer-focused (at Google!! Hahaha!!!) enough to court enterprise customers.
I work in the office, but when I really need to make progress on some stuff, I tell my boss I'm staying home. It absolutely makes a world of difference to be hard to find.
I read somewhere - I can't remember where - that the expression "other people" was at the time (written during the German occupation) a euphemism for German soldiers. I don't know if this is true and I've never actually read No Exit so maybe there's no softening the phrase but it could be that there's some nuance there.
> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.
Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it. In every office I've worked in in the past 20 years none of this really happened. It was 99.9% distraction. It's trivial to hop on a meeting with close collaborators or even non-close ones to bounce ideas off of. It's a mask argument for FOMO and the desire of those who simply prefer that environment for various non-collaborative reasons.
I work at Google and I agree with the poster that something significant is lost when you aren't physically present near each other.
But I am also fully remote at Google and I am never going back. Full remote is too valuable to me. I just think that it is useful to be honest about challenges that some people and teams face with remote work.
Thank for you saying this so clearly. It really articulates my own feelings.
Something is lost when you give up in person collaboration. But that can be fine and perhaps it has no real impact on your team’s productivity. And even with this loss, the benefits of remote working can greatly out weigh the drawbacks. But I think it’s worth being honest with ourselves and acknowledge that it’s a balancing act, and not try to say that remote work is superior in all aspects.
I can agree that "something" is lost. Just not what everyone is saying or thinks it is. I doubt anyone really knows. But agree that full remote is a different way of working and people need to get used to it still.
My experience has aligned with the person you're responding too. Often the best ideas came out of lunch conversations, slam diagramming on hallway white-boards....
It's strange (and also independent if real or virtual), but for me the worst ideas actually came out of those meetings where people "needed to brainstorm to come up with solution" - and usually also endless technical debt. The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team, draft something up, and again others can have time to think this through and thoroughly review.
Not that the other thing also sometimes happens, but majority not. Different problem domain, skills? (But anyway, totally independent if virtual or not..)
> The best when skilled people have enough time (!!) to think stuff through, mostly alone or small 2-3 ppl team
I like to say that small meetings of 2-4 people are great for figuring out what to do, and larger meetings are great to have a discussion about the plan made by the smaller meeting. It constrains the discussion and helps to limit rat-holing.
20+ years ago, it was considered good office manners to send an IM asking if someone if they were available before interrupting them with your physical presence.
In the olden days, you could “spontaneously” be productive by spending 2 hours talking to coworkers about something that will never ship - meanwhile the due date for your actual project just went out by 2 hours.
I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.
> Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.
As someone with ADHD, there are a lot of seeming “anti-productive distractions” I use to help me focus, but which would never be allowed in an office environment.
I’ve measured it: I’m more long-term productive at work when I’m also doing chores, talking to friends, petting my cat, watching YouTube videos, etc. at the same time. The social pressure to not be doing these things (or the impossibility of doing these things in an office), starves my brain of the input required to solve work problems. If the only thing I have to focus on is work… then I don’t.
> I prefer coworking for the “body doubling” effect. Social pressure keeps my anti-productive tendencies in check.
And this here is exactly why mandates are ridiculous. Just because YOU are unable to work remotely or YOUR leader is unable to lead you effectively when you're remote doesn't mean that your coworkers or their leaders are ineffective when remote.
> Just because YOU are unable to work remotely or YOUR leader is unable to lead you effectively when you're remote doesn't mean that your coworkers or their leaders are ineffective when remote.
This does not match my experience at all. If my coworkers and managers are bad at collaborating with remote workers then I will not be as effective working remotely no matter how good I personally am at it.
Supporting remote work allows a company to attract employees from a larger pool of labor which allows them to to get higher caliber employees while paying the same or lower salaries. It also saves on office costs. I'm not surprised to see more companies doing this.
But doing so also requires adopting culture, processes, and tools across the entire organization. It's not something an individual worker can do on their own.
Of course, you and I both know that this is the first, second, and only reason for RTO: everybody who doesn't know how to program a computer is convinced, and will remain convinced until the day they die, that the only way to keep us programmer grunts "productive" is to have somebody standing behind us monitoring our behavior with a clipboard 40 hours a week.
Such a remote scenario also heavily favors "extroverts" and other such people that are happy to "hop on a meeting" with someone. The key is that it's not "hop on a meeting", that's easy for an extrovert, it's that you're interrupting someone and taking time out of their day, and you don't want to disturb etc etc. Introverts, "shy" and other such non-people people, will struggle with that and they'll have t re-learn working in a work environment.
You get people that are "selfish" in that regard (yes you get introverts like that too) and don't mind taking up someone else's time or interrupting them. WFH heavily favors those people, and no one is speaking up about this.
In-person work is way worse for this. Extroverts are constantly bugging everyone with small talk, talking loudly on the phone, in the kitchen, the hall, the bathroom...
Extroverts walk around and bug random people to get their "fix". Things should be async when you're remote. If someone pings you to meet, just ignore it until you are ready to deal with it. That's impossible in the office.
I agree that's what extroverts do - and it's definitely an interruption! But this scenario specifically is when the "introvert" needs to initiate a talk to someone. I'd argue that that is much easier in the office when the perceived amount of "interruption" they would cause to the other person is low, and when the natural flow of the conversation can bring up an entry point for them. It also makes it more likely for their manager/senior/mentor to notice they are having an issue without them having to initiate.
Thing is, the extroverts will now do the same, they'll just do it remotely and schedule incessant '1 on 1's with their reports, who are more likely to be introverts.
Overall, it's not an easy problem to solve and optimize. But the preference then should be to do what we've always done and slowly "peek" into potential different ways of doing it, instead of dropping the bomb and saying full WFH or full Y and here is why X or Y is correct.
Honestly, I don't see how it could be easier for introverts in the scenario you mention. If an introvert needs something when they're WFH, they just send a slack message. I probably doesn't even require a face to face interaction.
For reference, I manage a fully remote team and we do one real-time video meeting a week, the rest is pure text and async. We are a very high performing team that consists of people new to the industry as well as veterans.
Introvert and extrovert are pretty blunt terms, there are people who find it easy to talk to others and those who find it difficult even when necessary, these might but do not need to correspond to wanting to talk to others (among other nuances). Introvert usually groups those who have difficulty and those who dislike talking to others, but with work from home that grouping doesn’t necessarily make sense.
If it’s harder for you to initiate conversations, bumping into people and common office occurrences can make it easier to start talking. But if you don’t like talking to others than bumping into people can feel intrusive.
This is a completely stereotypical and offensive view of extraverted people. You conflated them with loud and inconsiderate individuals. I suggest you read up on what extraversion is, because it's not pestering random people with small talk.
As an introvert with Asperger and an adamant pro-office guy I can't relate, what you describe sounds more like social anxiety or sociophobia, and require proper treatment (also facing (semi)professional conversations is a good treatment of its own since you know the topic and the people)
> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.
> Lots of people say this, but I just don't see it.
...probably because the scenario has been framed as a benefit and it is clearly not.
It's a lot easier to hit someone up on slack, as normalized behavior, than having to "accidentally" run into them in a hall. I know all the people I work with. I know that I can access them as a resource. When in the office or at home, if you can't initiate ideation without happenstance, you have a behavioral problem that is masked by working in an office.
I had a single casual conversation spontaneously in the office that directly led to a million dollar product getting created. It wasn’t even a “bouncing idea” talk, it came from nerds nerding-out at the lunch table.
That one example sold me.
Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.
(Edit: note, I’m pro-working from home, but I don’t agree that you can 1:1 recreate in-person ideation/spontaneity over a screen with scheduled meetings. Based on the downvotes I guess that’s a controversial opinion in 2023. Wild.)
> Perhaps it could have happened over Zoom, but my experience is that post-scheduled meeting most people drop off instantly — they’re not interested in any casual conversation. Most people say a word or two about the weather or their sports team then jump into their next Zoom call.
In person or remote, if there are other meetings I'm not hanging out, I'm off to the next one.
> I had a single casual conversation spontaneously in the office that directly led to a million dollar product getting created. It wasn’t even a “bouncing idea” talk, it came from nerds nerding-out at the lunch table.
How much of that $1M was reflected in your paycheck?
I have random chats in the "watercooler" channels with like minded people. It's whether you're interested in anything - not whether you hang out in the right room.
I hang out in those rooms too. My experience doesn’t mean good ideas don’t or can’t happen there. But I personally feel more “creatively productive” when I can read the room and gauge folks’ expressions/enthusiasm.
People are different. What works for me may not work for you, your team, company culture, etc.
Mind that I work with physical products so often collaboration involves talking about and handling actual objects, but I've found that the team I'm on has lost something when relying on virtual collaboration sessions where only one of the people actually has the item they are talking about. This is especially true for the more junior members of the team who require more collaboration.
When I'm in the office I get practically nothing done due to this, but the end effect is that the whole team is more efficient since others are unblocked with a clear direction. This just doesn't happen as well when we are relying on someone reaching out to setup a call where we try to talk through a problem that is better solved by actually standing around to collaborate. I also see it happen with the newer teams in other locations, we miss the small details in things that you only think to talk about when you are sitting in a meeting room over a prototype that gets passed around.
I know that different people not only have quite different preferences but also different working styles, but I generally agree with this.
IME the slight extra friction of initiating a call acts as a filter which means that I am less likely to ask colleagues either something which only saves me a few seconds, or to just start a nebulous discussion. Text chat is the right medium for both of these, even when in the office, as it's asynchronous and no one else has to hear it. When I call someone I tend to have at least a clear question or request for something that will make a significant different to what I can get done today.
The other argument against the benefits of face-to-face communication is that, unless everyone in your org works in the same city (or even, on the same floor - since most people don't walk around huge offices to ask colleagues quick questions), you should be practising with the online communications and finding good ways of working with them anyway. Otherwise fully distributed teams degrade into geographic silos, and teams with only a few remote people tend to just leave them out.
I think this is the crux of why people have such disparate estimates of remote productivity.
Senior folks seem to experience more upside and less downside being remote whereas junior folks seem to experience more downside and less upside.
Depending on the makeup of the team, one or the other may be net more productive even if you yourself feel less productive. (It may also depend on whether your company sufficiently acknowledges and rewards the work senior folks do unblocking and mentoring others.)
I don't think senior/junior is the right divide. There's tons of young people cranking out absolutely amazing things from home in the open source community. What I've found is that product focused people who ship with high velocity like remote work, regardless of their time in the industry.
Low velocity shippers who lean on process are the ones who seem to want to go back in the office. Presumably because you can mask not shipping by chatting with your manager or playing meeting roulette.
That lines up with my experience as well. I think though that there is a cutoff where very junior people are almost never going to be highly productive and require fairly constant babysitting.
I think you can mentor/babysit them in a remote environment, but it takes intentional effort.
This is just a symptom of a larger problem though, which is that people try to get useful work out of very junior developers. They should instead treat them as investments that will generate useful work in the future. If you can’t do this, you shouldn’t be hiring juniors.
I agree, if you are hire juniors you need to know what you are getting.
The thing is not all juniors are the same, some are a lot more immediately productive than others. When it comes to remote work it's hard to bullshit, you are either checking things in, or you aren't. You can only go by productivity.
I don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own. There are absolutely exceptions who prove the rule but on average we found productivity plummet with remote junior hires and remain similar for folks who have been at the company for decades across all skill levels. Even high-velocity junior folks seemed to be spinning their wheels or getting stuck when remote in a way that perfectly average senior folks did not.
I was anticipating employee pushback as the company switched from remote to return-to-office 3 days a week last year. But the junior folks I've talked to have seemed mostly enthusiastic (with significantly higher retention than when we were remote) whereas the objections mostly came from senior folks. The people who quit to keep working remotely were almost entirely senior folks.
> I don't doubt your experience, but it is not my own.
Are your scenarios the symptom or the cause? Do juniors prefer in office not because of the office or other reasons? E.g. do they have the support they need remotely, is there enough documentation, etc? Usually requiring adhoc in-person interactions is just masking the real issues. The seniors are fine because they've already had workarounds for it.
In talking to the junior folks the two things they bring up are mentorship and socialization.
With mentorship I think you're spot on with regard to adhoc interactions. Senior folks know who, how, and when to ask when they're blocked, or when they need to plant an idea in someone's head. Even though we have daily stand-ups, weekly 1-1 check-ins, and responsive mentors a number of junior folks seemed less comfortable admitting and asking for help when remote until it was too late. My company is overall the best place I've worked but has poor processes in this regard -- it's one of those places entirely run by engineers where everyone is proud of how "flat" the org is which is code for a hidden and ad-hoc org chart. I'll bet manager training and process could have minimized that, but it would be a tougher sell than RTO -- so you go to war with the army you've got.
With regard to socialization, the junior folks seem to hang out with each other after work quite a bit more. We also have lots of social events, presentations, movies, etc during work hours. We had similar sessions set up for remote folks that are well attended but don't seem to scratch the same itch.
Normally I agree, but the differences were particularly stark. After a couple of years the top junior performers were almost all in-person. They were more self sufficient, more likely to still be working at the company, generally made the products they worked on more successful, etc. There were certainly exceptions, but the trend became fairly clear even to remote work advocates. I think that's why we had so few objections to RTO -- even folks who quit over it admitted it was the right choice for our company.
I'd wager better remote processes and culture could have shrunk the gap, and I'm happy so many companies are doing that well, it just didn't work for our company.
I guess we just have different experiences, but I will say that in 20+ years in the industry working in a ton of companies of different sizes, on products used by tens of millions of people... that the highest quality output has always come from remote developers. Some of that is because you can hire world class devs if you look anywhere in the world, but if you hire locally you're tied down to the best devs that can commute to your office, a talent pool orders of magnitude smaller than the global dev community and excluding those people good enough to refuse anything other than WFH.
Totally agree that hiring locally is much more constraining. I'm having trouble filling positions and we're in a major tech hub and can afford to pay near the top of the range for our area so we have it easier than most. Logically our remote competitors should be at an enormous and overwhelming competitive advantage.
But it hasn't happened yet. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if it does happen, maybe it's just a matter of time. And personally I hope it does happen, as remote work is better for the planet and regional inequality.
But the trend seems to be more companies going back in person. Maybe they're all behaving irrationally or trying to prop up commercial real-estate or something. But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers, and the latter being slightly easier in person is enough to offset the costs.
> But the trend seems to be more companies going back in person.
That's the trend with the megacorps but almost every startup that's been created in the past 3 years is fully remote or at least remote friendly (for the reasons we've both outlined with regard to access to talent and lack of office overhead).
> But it's also worth acknowledging the uncomfortable possibility that high-quality output from world-class rockstar devs isn't as critical for making successful products as coordination between perfectly average developers.
> I'm having trouble filling positions and we're in a major tech hub and can afford to pay near the top of the range
I have to say that in all of my years of management I've never struggled to hire amazing developers. Some of that is that I will only work on interesting problems and it's easy to attract great devs in that situation. I'm not sure what I'd do if I had to hire local to where I'm physically located though. That would be an issue in both crowded markets like the valley or non-crowded markets (with little local senior talent).
Have you ever tried building a purely remote team? The number one thing I'd recommend is to focus on trust. Remove as much process as possible and trust your team to do what you hired them for. If they're not succeeding, it's possible the wrong people were hired, which indicates that the wrong managers were hired.
I think you may be on to a useful distinction there, but I'm not sure I agree with your implicit values.
Folks who consider themselves "high-velocity" seem to look down on process and prioritize their own productivity over the productivity of the team and the organization. They seem to believe that they'll be evaluated on number of features shipped, or tickets closed, or lines written. They seem to consider coordination with others to be overhead that distracts from "real work".
That mindset may work for small shops or independent features but in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.
I'm not talking about self-diagnosed high-velocity, I as their manager see that they are high-velocity, high-quality developers.
> That mindset may work for small shops or independent features but in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.
I've always modeled my team's process on open source development, which has successfully produced very high quality "big" software. Documentation in code, PRs and issues, async communication... I've never seen regular company process (things like Agile) produce software that matches the quality of that done with a more distributed and async process.
From that perspective, hiring accomplished open source developers leads to an amazing team. Back to my original point, those people may be 18 years old or 60 years old. The trick is to build a team of people who have a proven ability to ship.
I'm not sure what more there is to say. I'm happy that you have created remote processes that work well for your team. I wish we were better at that. My personal experience is still that groups of high-velocity rockstar developers relying on asych coordination can deliver features faster day-to-day but are not as successful year-to-year. I do believe you that it's possible though, and perhaps someday fully-remote competitors with lower salary/office costs will eat our lunch. Perhaps it requires better managers than we have. Still, we ship software our customers love and are extremely financially successful so I have trouble faulting management for continuing to do what has proven successful.
> I've always modeled my team's process on open source development which has successfully produced very high quality "big" software
That's an interesting example and reminds me of an anecdote. At my last company I worked on a very (very) expensive fintech product. We had several competitors including an open source alternative that we were quite nervous about. I wouldn't be surprised if their code quality was higher than ours. But while many customers donated to them, spent a lot of effort integrating them, and talked about them a lot (especially when negotiating contracts) in the end we never lost a customer to the open source alternative.
Don't get me wrong, I love free and open source software and personally use and support several projects. But with a handful of exceptions open source developers seem to be more successful at creating tools for other developers than products for non-technical end-users.
> can deliver features faster day-to-day but are not as successful year-to-year.
This sounds like a management problem. If you have productive people and that productivity isn't leading to success, there's a bigger problem in the company at the strategy and product definition level.
> Perhaps it requires better managers than we have.
That's the thing, if a company insists on working from the office it's a sign that they have bad management. Not every remote company has good management but the inability to manage remotely is a sign of bad management.
> in my experience successful large products are built by people who are willing to invest as much effort in coordination as they do in heads-down coding.
In my experience, successful large products make so much money that it's possible for non-productive people to exist in large enterprises. This wouldn't be the case on smaller case. But that does mean that those people are actually needed in any way.
> But that does mean that those people are actually needed in any way.
True, the presence of people who spend time coordinating is not sufficient for success, nor is their presence in any way evidence of success.
But the absence of people who devote time to coordination has definitely sunk projects I've been on, including ones stacked with brilliant rockstars. It may simply be correlation, but I have never worked on a large, successful project that lacked people who were willing to invest significant effort in coordination.
I suspect it's more individual contributor vs. leadership, where senior developers are more likely to be in some form of technical leadership role on their teams.
The senior folks are sometimes cleaning up messes created by the junior folks.
The last 10 years it seems like junior developers have become less likely to own up to their mistakes and senior engineers have to track down the mistake and then pull in the junior engineer to discuss what the mistake was and what the fix needs to be. The Junior engineer didn't want to participate at all and thinks their productivity is being impacted because they just want to keep working on whatever new feature ticket they think represents productivity. The seniors are thinking their productivity is increased when everyone is in the office cause they can much more rapidly find the people responsible and pull them into an in person meeting and do a full interrupt on the people responsible for an issue.
It's like the juniors are too incentivized by completing new feature tickets versus generating positive customer impacts or something.
I've been at 3 companies in the past 11 years and seen this at all of them.
I don't understand this way of looking at things. I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to. That helps both of us. If I don't even have to think about it, it helps the other person be immediately productive (and learn something) at the cost of taking me out of "the flow" as opposed to having them beat their head against it for who knows how long while I get a a couple more minutes of uninterrupted time. I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately.
If it happened every five minutes that's a different story.
> I sometimes learn something new by answering a question from someone who is looking at things from a different direction than I am, or discussing something I don't have a quick answer to
This can happen on Slack or whatever too, but with much less friction. I'm not ignoring teammates for days - I just want to be able to take 10 minutes or whatever to reach a reasonable place to context-switch versus being forced to do so right now.
> I can hop back into "the flow" pretty much immediately.
I envy you, but I very much cannot do this. If I'm working on something of sufficient complexity, I'm going to lose at least 15 minutes every time I'm forced to make a substantive context-switch. It's a huge drain for me.
This is a great way to get management up your ass and get fired.
End of the day, it’s all about the culture of your workplace. No one here really understands that. I’ve been interrupted more during remote work at some companies than when in person at others. It’s entirely culture dependent.
Easy, just learn to push back or setup mechanisms like office hours to attend for folks whom are in need of support.
Like security, the human chain will always be the weakest link here. If you don't have backbone to stand up for your own time, that's on you - not the remote work inherently IMO.
About ten years ago I worked at a company with a DBA who saw gatekeeping everything database related as a form of job security. But he also complained bitterly about how often he was interrupted. Even simple things like adding a column to a table required his participation. When developing, these types of changes are frequent and often blocking, so creating something like a ticket queue wasn't a good solution. Our manager was not only aware of the situation but seemed entertained by the inherent conflict it created.
Since going through that extreme case of blocking through gatekeeping, I try to keep my eyes out for ways to allow other to self-service as much as possible. It's not possible to eliminate all interruptions but it's often worth spending a bit of time examining how the interruption could have been avoided in the first place and if similar interruptions are likely, invest in creating something more self-service. At least in the DBA situation I was in back then, simply allowing developers to have local database or even control over development database on a dedicated database instance would have eliminated most of the blocking and interruptions.
If your superiors don't consider you training people part of your job then you should either get them (ahead of time) to agree it's part of your job or you should stop doing it.
The thing is it's not always obvious. You don't always spell out how many hours each day you spend training others and so management just thinks you're doing nothing.
And then seniors have to pull overtimes just because they need to semi-constantly babysit juniors, or clueless managers of other teams or projects who only know how to escalate and chase etc.
I get it, if you are junior, there are benefits. If you are senior (and not ie team lead and control freak at the same time), you lose. Hell you lose a LOT, can confirm. Offices are way more stressful, so this is clear downgrade for senior people. Constant noise and interruptions way overweight the benefits.
Guess who brings more added value to companies, juniors or seniors? (not talking about long term perspective, most companies are led by people who focus on next bonus only, and who they manage is steered that way too).
A former boss called me the most distractable person he had ever met. I've worked in open plan offices since 1997.
But apparently I have superhuman abilities to concentrate, because honestly I've never found it difficult to ignore people around me to focus and get work done. And yet I don't feel special, most people I've worked with seem to able to do it.
I understand many people don't prefer it, and they should very much choose jobs accordingly. But I guess I'll stop pretending my preferences are based on objective criteria when everyone else does too.
For me, this is the bottom line. Working in an office -- even the best offices I've ever seen -- is a pretty terrible experience in a ton of ways.
In my younger years, I kinda gave up on actually getting anything done in the office. It's just too difficult. So I'd take my work home and make up for the time wasted in the office by doing my work in the evenings.
Eventually I wised up and stopped doing that, but that didn't make working in the office any more productive.
I think it's generally better to take the short-term productivity hit to train the new hire than it is to leave them to the wolves for your own work. Two heads are better than one and all that
By the only metric that matters -- collective output.
Combined with the negative metric of employee burnout, which inevitably follows from years of exposure to open plan offices, constant interruptions ... and the toxic positivity of company owners pretending how wonderful these things are for everyone.
Some people don't work like that. When I'm in a flow state, a 5 minute interruption can break me out of it and slow me down for a half hour or more before I'm finally able to get back into flow.
They are doing it wrong. If you keep two or three things on the go you can switch to a different one when you get stuck without wasting hours or interrupting someone else right this minute. Very often, having switched focus the solution to the original problem will reveal itself without needing to bother anyone.
An org can find ways to ensure juniors don't stay blocked while also ensuring that seniors can keep in flow state for long, uninterrupted periods.
Prioritize docs and tests. Teach juniors how to use docs and tests. Spread knowledge and mentorship around enough that a question on the team channel gets an answer from someone who is available.
All of these things have other major benefits in addition to restoring flow state for seniors—juniors learn faster, your tests are more comprehensive, seniors can basically onboard themselves, your bus factor goes way up. "Stick everyone in the same room" is just a local maximum, not peak productivity.
> IMO you lose so much more by sacrificing spontaneous conversation & ideation that results.
People repeat this like a mantra when defending open floor plans (usually managers), but I very much doubt it. Most people seem to hate open floor plans. The subject seems to have gone by the wayside with the pandemic (then it was a question of finding a quiet place to work in a house shared with other people). I'm sure it varies by occupation, but the cost of distraction relative to whatever benefit you might gain from conversation is like investing money in the lottery. Yeah, you might win something, but you mostly won't and the cost will be enormous. I sense a bit of classic FOMO opportunism motivating such rationalizations.
Leaning in to "spontaneous conversations" as a benefit of office work is so weird. I count "spontaneous conversations" as close to the #1 downside of working in an office. Your ideation is my distraction. Also, championing in-person conversation as a way to communicate in the office often results in poor official communication: It's better to have clear, written communication of company/division decisions than relying on "Oh, I ran into Bill in the hallway and he said the team's now working on the FooBar project this quarter!" And poor internal documentation: How does this API work? "Talk to Erica" vs. "Read the internal wiki here"
You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question
Depending on who you are, massive massive benefit. In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.
training is AWFUL remote. Not even close
Definitely agree with this as a statement on how things currently ARE (in general), but they don't have to be that way. A lot of companies who struggle with this turn out to be just really bad at training in general. Previously, they got lucky; the people in need of education scrounged it by interrupting people or watching people or asking someone to metaphorically hold their hand. Companies were training by chance, rather than by design. Remote working demands a different way of training people, a different way of managing people and measuring output; a lot of companies are failing badly at this and falling back to failing less badly at it in the only way they know (i.e. everyone back to the office so we at don't suck quite so much at training and management and collaborating).
> In the office it was hard to get people to stop turning up at my desk at a time convenient to them, regardless of what I was doing, to interrupt me.
Where I currently work (100% in the office, sadly), there is a coworker who did this to me regularly. He was causing a serious loss of productivity, and wouldn't stop.
So I started doing the same to him, stopping by his cube a few times a day at random to ask some legitimate technical question.
The end of the week I started doing that, he complained to me about my constantly interrupting him. It was causing him to fall behind in his work.
I told him "Of course, I'll start messaging you instead of stopping by. Would you extend the same courtesy to me?"
Agreed! Companies were basically sticking a bunch of people in a primordial soup and then stepping back and hoping for abiogenesis. It turns out people are pretty creative, so you would often get it, but that doesn't make the primordial soup the be-all-end-all of company organization.
At some point you have to develop self-awareness, you have to develop structures capable of improving intentionally. Those structures will dramatically outperform the primordial soup approach, but they do take work to build.
Absolutely nailed it. Remote work requires a bit more upfront involvement but the payoff is a more independent and healthy workforce (generally speaking). This will 100% highlight any failures in your current system/model.
Our onboarding system has been terrible for as long as anyone here can remember. Remote just made it stand out but it was always shit.
Maybe it varies by field. For myself, onboarding new developers has felt about the same as it did in person. I can't just stop by their desk but banging a message into chat and then starting a call if their response seems to far off track is not that much harder. A little friction but isn't it part of my job to get past that and make sure this person is productive as quickly as possible?
Overall my team has improved with remote work. Before the pandemic it was a struggle to find developers, in large part because of our location (expensive New England college town) and the (unspoken but clear) requirement that people come to the office every day. Now my current team is comprised of developers from Toronto, Sweden, etc. We hit our targets and get work done.
I wouldn't trade it for anything and I hope the pay grade above me realizes the concrete importance of the people and the work over this abstract idea of "community".
A sage mentor of mine, who was also a major proponent of remote work, said this about hiring remote: “Do you really want to limit your candidate pool to those within driving distance to your office? Why not your entire country? Time zone? Planet?”
Historically, people at work wanted to talk about anything other than work. They'd talk about football, politics, last night's Britain's Got Talent, or whatever; yet spend a whole day struggling with a task without asking their colleagues at the same desk for help.
Our remote teams have this culture that you say is impossible. They're in their chats or voice calls all day communicating, and measurably crush the in-office teams' productivity, maybe due to the efficiencies gained by going async, or maybe due to the type of people (people who find interactions through text more meaningful than in person or verbal, and insist upon it)
The in office teams on the other hand seem to rely on synchronous work and so they block each other, and this seems to mean the group can only finish a small number of tasks per day, whereas our remote teams complete bigger work more frequently.
I also find a lot of our juniors or quieter folk are a lot more confident talking to people in the remote setting.
I've recently been finding that even where in-person meetings are an option, having everyone at their desk with full access to all their files, emails etc. along with the ability to quickly and easily share their screen is just more productive. There's far less need to make a list of things to follow up during the meeting because you can usually take care of these things as they come up.
Only thing I've ever gained this way were some bread-making tips (which admittedly were pretty good).
Our office has handily addressed this problem by making communities of expertise that anyone can join, occasional icebreaker events, and monthly showcases of what we're working on or investigating (this usually is just a few minutes of presentation by each team and is optional).
Make it easy for people to connect and they will do so. Meanwhile when I'm at the office, it's headphone-city and the open office format makes those random chats very distracting and frustrating.
Strong agree on the remote training being entirely possible. My first dev job was remote (long before the pandemic) and onboarding was not a problem at all.
In fact because you need people to get set up remotely, I find the documentation tends to be better at all remote companies. In-Office companies sort of assume that you can just tap someone on the shoulder if you get stuck so there's more often, in my experience, gaps in the documentation.
I particularly find this a strange claim since open source projects have been successfully onboarding new people remotely prior to there even being efficient ways to screen share/video chat etc.
At my last company, we had to go into the office once per week. The hellacious commute aside (I would arrive somewhere around 10:00, and leave somewhere around 15:00 to avoid rush hour - subtract lunch, and that’s not a lot of work getting done), it was just full of distractions. I don’t want to take regular breaks to go shoot the shit, or to go have a beer after lunch. I want to get work done, and I do that best with headphones on and not being bothered.
> It's not perfect but a group of aligned people in the same physical working space will just dominate a similar group spread apart that has to use chats & zoom to communicate. Management has got to be seeing this, in various forms, across multiple business segments.
There's no data on this, at the very least you could mention that it's only your personal impression ?
IMO (and this is clearly a personal take) there are two competing effects:
- higher bandwidth and easier to align face to face
- more distractions, interruptions, more complicated to get things done
If you're in a business or position where you have no IP or nothing hard to do per say, you'll see the first one dominate. If you're somewhere with IP and competitive advantages through smarts then I'd say (personal again) the second effect can come to dominate.
Google pulling a "no remote" move means to me that their competitive advantage in terms of engineering and smarts is not a priority + using the fact that the market swung back towards employers vs. employees. But not general comment about "this take is obviously so much better", this is just intellectual lazyness I believe
> the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question
This is an anti feature of offices.
Usually that brief interruption costs about an hours productivity for anyone doing stuff like programming, etc, due to the massively high cost of context switching.
It could have been an email/IM.
> training is AWFUL remote.
This implies that the training is lacking anyway, in most cases.
I agree that onboarding remotely is terrible. From a junior perspective trying to figure out what is going on remotely is hard. Things happen like you get stuck with things and wait two hours for a slack response which still isnt great.
This is a failure to design. You can't go remote but make no other changes in your org—effective remote requires you to be intentional about the things that you previously just hoped work. There are lots of different ways to make it work, but it sounds like your company hasn't done anything.
I have spontaneous conversation and ideation daily at my remote job. In slack. Both with teammates in DMs and team channels, and in more general channels.
I have never had trouble asking people questions. And I get asked them all the time. In fact, that the questions and answers are written and async is superior. When I was in the office, people would frequently take conversations to Slack (or say "could you Slack me what you just told me?")
Personally too, I find written communication to be superior. I will do quick video calls with people but that's rare (and usually to the taste of the other person).
We also have excellent training backboned by mentorship.
> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question.
That's a benefit to working from home. One of the worst things about office work is that it makes it easy for someone to come and interrupt your train of thought. It takes time to enter the flow, and almost no time to be shoved out of it, at which point you have to take time to get back into the flow.
A quick question can cost a half hour or so that way.
This is where IM or email shine. You can ignore it until you're in a place where answering it won't be so costly.
I lose 2 hours/day commuting + 1/2 hour de-stress from driving through shit traffic. I get far more work done on my WFH days than I do my in-office days. I'm an IC and don't need to do much mentoring, and when i do it's always easier to do it remotely with screen sharing than to try and sit two chairs into the same office. The only reason I come into the office is to have lunch with my co-workers. I do NOT see them the entire rest of the day.
Do NOT approach me to ask a question when I am sitting at my desk. I am trying to work. Send an email or some other message through another collaboration platform. Stay AWAY.
I think in-person collaboration helps, but with folks on the outside of your team. If you are on a small team or in a small startup, I don’t see a big impact of in person communication. You will be interacting with these same people so much that you will grow a close bond with them regardless. When I think about the small company projects I’ve done, it’s honestly hard to tell which were remote and which weren’t - the bonds formed and amount of teamwork was the same.
For large company settings it’s a different story - if I have to have tons of meetings with a pool of various 100 people for many hours a week, some of them occasionally, yes it would be super helpful to have all those in person to establish connections quicker. However, even with RTO there is little chance those people would be in the same office, so you would be stuck on video calls anyways.
There is probably a sweet spot of medium sized companies where there is a lot of people but they are still in the same floor where in office would be effective. But for google scale - not so much.
None these things are immutable laws of work though. They can all be fostered in a remote first environment, its just not the same thing.
Its a "lazy" solution to require RTO for the sake of collaboration, training etc. as there are demonstrated examples (like GitLab, for instance, also see companies like Linear, Supabase etc that are full remote and still pushing out great work).
While I get sometimes in person meetings are great, they really start to lose their effectiveness past a certain point, and I think thats pretty clear with these remote first companies that are successful is they took the time to re-think process, re-think culture, and re-think the approach.
What I find with RTO companies is they want to plug their ears to the idea of real change, because its a real effort to get everyone to do things a bit differently. For example, look at the struggles everyone seems to have around maintaining useful documentation and async communication. One thing I realized is companies that took remote seriously gravitated away from everything being a Zoom call and started pushing in earnest centralized documentation and async communication. Long form responses became the norm. In depth Wiki's became the norm. Those are two examples I've seen in successful remote environments that I think, anecdotally, remain true across the board.
Companies that don't give this real thought are the ones that seem to also be going back to RTO. To me, RTO is an implicit acknowledgement that the culture of the company is unchangeable, and leadership is unable to consider different ways people work.
You can have all this in remote first cultures, that much is clear.
That said, I think it should be everyone's individual choice, if one was to ask me. I have no issue with people wanting to work an office everyday, but forcing everyone to work in an office every day is the problem
> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question
Isn't that the distraction people try to avoid? I don't think there is an expectation from anyone that people should walk over to someone's desk and ask questions. In fact, I believe it's the opposite of what's typically being welcomed – do your own research, dive deep into the problem, work with the problem from different angles, etc.
I do not believe that remote training is awful. When someone's trained remotely, they can always record a meeting and come back to that recording many times in the future. If something is unclear, just send a message. Nobody's recording screenshares in the office, so training/onboarding material from your co-workers gets easily lost. This leads to distractions, such as walking over to someone's desk and asking follow up questions.
> You also lose the ease of just walking over to someone to ask a question
Here's what typically happened in every company I worked at. I ask a question, they tell me to look at the documentation. I look it up, do what I needed to do, and at some point, it all unravels because the documentation is horribly out of date, and there was something else that needed to be done from the beginning, which this other guy knows about.
Training is always awful, in person and remote. Nobody wants to help or give any info, even when you are asking questions specific to the company product. Things that can't be googled, or things that the team would be better off just telling rather than letting the new guy struggle for a week.
Sometimes I do a sketch MR and share that code. Then other people can give advice and check some specific implementation. I found in general discussions are more productive when discussing specific things. This also shows to people that you did some work. In general it makes them more receptive.
This is different for junior and senior engineers. If your work is a lot of smaller things and you need to ask a lot of questions, an office is useful. If you have deeper work and need to focus for hours, the open-plan office is terrible.
Working remote allows me to finish my thoughts, finish the task at hand or just take a breather when I need to. I think that’s the same for those who prefer remote work.
Async communication is far better for a team that needs to get through a never shrinking pile of work.
Remote work isn’t for everyone. It’s a preference, with zero impact on productivity or efficiency for those that prefer it.
I will admit one major downside. It’s easier to move one’s career forward, especially in management if you’re able to chat with higher level decision-makers as-hoc and in person. For those that thrive off of connections to climb the ladder, remote is a much harder climb.
I'd put more faith in the claims of valuing spontaneous conversation and just walking down the hall if companies actually had full teams in a single physical location, where this would be possible.
I've been in the software industry (QA and dev) since 2000. Other than a short time with a startup, I have _never_ been on a team where everyone has been in the same state, never mind the same city.
A while ago on hacker news there was a story about a team of n<10 that was split between the east coast and West coast. They setup an always on zoom call on a dedicated screen in each office. Obviously this won't scale if you work with tons of people, but I would think it's quite useful if you are prototyping or building something together as a team.
And it's never "just a question", either. Social etiquette being what it is, nobody ever comes over and says, "what port does Postgres run on again?". They come over and say hello, and chat a bit, then they ask about ports, then they go off on a tangent about networking problems, then they chat about their kids for a while, then they finally say, "oh shoot I have a meeting in five minutes, got to go".
The efficacy of remote/hybrid can often be a function of how well the company worked distributed across multiple office locations prior to the pandemic.
Physical proximity (and being able to close a door) is a magnifier and multiplier in one way, and digital proximity (and disconnection) to be able to connect with someone is different.
How well the company works in terms of systems and processes that work well remotely prior to the pandemic is a starting point.
Being forced online/distributed at the pandemic doesn’t mean an organization is, or was any good at it.
Offices must provide what the home can’t to remain an alternative.
Offices (home or at work) should be helping me get more done with less effort compared to my home. Interruptions are an effect of culture, or lack of it. The fixed cost investment in better monitors, internet, seating and managing interruptions can go a long way to finding and keeping flow.
While day to day tasks may be ok working remote, problem solving is generally more effective in person when others are involved.
Onboarding of new team members goes much quicker with an in person component for the first few weeks before going hybrid or remote.
Remote work may be ok for one person departments but many are starting to experience burnout after Covid. What’s next in life and career and finding who and what tot all to with hands on or shadowing has its value. In person is also a retention strategy of orgs, fewer opportunities to wander without more effort.
Still organizations who lament about in person work are almost always guilty of falling prey to not reading the full study on open concept workspaces. And they’re free to demand in person work, they sign the checks and people can vote with their feet.
Orgs can do better, especially for knowledge work, by providing a door to close - this is an immense offset against working remotely. Full time open concept working is not a productivity multiplier in most cases.
I’ve worked remotely at a higher pace (more than 8 hr/day) for the better part of 2 decades, while having an office (with a door) nearly the entire time. In person always has its place. But I like flexibility in my life just as much.
In the US, offices might mean longer commutes and less time with family but it’s not necessarily like that everywhere.
It seems like some folks want to have their cake and eat it too. I have less than a 10 minute walk to my office, it won’t always be that way.
Currently we are designing our new office to have all the concierge type services the current demographic needs. Among the top of the list is full access to extremely fast internet (10-30Gbit) that is snappy not available at home.
Of course, it’s possible to solve problems remotely with some people more than others, which can be a function of how long you’ve worked together. I get to work with some of the same people for a long time, it offers unfair advantages like what is being described. Even in that case though, it’s faster in person than online. This is harder to talk about with some folks because they rarely have both feet in one job long enough (3-5y+) to go deep and wide on problems.
To the extent an organization is mature and not innovating too much, remote or hybrid work can be much more feasible. The better their systems and processes, especially companies who have distributed offices.
One reality is there are too many people who demand remote work and also have also taken unfair advantage of it more and more over time. They are then making it ok to offer their position off to the best value globally and not to just them. The role of telemetry of ones productivity or availability is a factor in this based on the tooling.
While interruption is enemy of productivity - instead of being being interrupted by people at work, other distractions await at home. Emails and slack can be far worse interruptions. Many people can’t resist doing certain activities at home that are far beyond.
Digital meetings that drone on for much longer online to overcommunicate can’t be more productive than being forced to stand up for 15 minutes to talk.
Fully agree. Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.
As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.
there isn't a single colleague in my department (~30 people) who preferred WFH where I feel they were more productive, or even on par. Quite the opposite, those who exclusively stayed at home when working completely lost touch, gave vague updates and excuses about what they're working on and what current problems are. When they returned to office (we've three mandatory days at the office now), it really showed how disconnected they were from all the process and changes that happened over the last two years. And I mostly don't have to care, I'm not responsible for these people, except for one instance my work doesn't even directly depend on them, but I can absolutely see why an employer wants to get everyone back into office. It's not worth keeping WFH up if for every one of those few who actually benefit from it, there are five others who you basically now need ten times the effort to make sure they di their hours and don't just bullshit you in endless video conferences with flaky connections and parrots going mad in the background and whatnot.
> As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.
> Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.
> As for myself, I do prefer the adhoc discussion of issues, brain storming and silly what-ifs during coffee breaks et cetera. I'm much more in the zone in this environment.
You prefer to chat with your colleagues during work, and you work well collaboratively with interruptions, but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets. Instead you accuse them of slacking off.
> but you can't envisage that other people have both different personal preferences, and different skillsets.
I can, but as said, I think they are rare.
> Instead you accuse them of slacking off.
I transparently stated the numbers where I got my anecdotal evidence from. I could go into detail of how and what individuals did or didn't do, but I don't see how that helps. Either take my word for it or you don't believe it anyways. And again, in my sample WFH folks were a minority, the majority was rather indifferent, and some preferred the office like me.
This is such a classically offensive extrovert take. "Because I enjoy random and spontaneous interaction, everyone else must too." Introverts are just a conspiracy by the lazy.
I highly recommend reading Quiet.
I'm lucky enough to have found a team entirely composed of introverts. It's fully remote, and it's the most productive team I've ever been on. We have the most comprehensive test suite I've ever seen, the fastest rate of deployment, the fewest prod incidents, and I'm finally able to stay focused for a whole day without being interrupted for meaningless chit-chat.
That your team hired people who can't be trusted to self-manage is not a reflection on remote work, it's a reflection on your hiring process.
And your team is the norm rather than the exception? How about fields other than software dev? Just like the other replies, you pretend I said people who do better in WFH scenarios don't exist, at the same time you admit that you're "lucky enough" to have found such a team, admitting that it is in fact the exception.
> Those people who say that they're much more productive at home must be a minority of a minority, and the rest of them just lie because they want to slack off.
This reads as though you called about half of the people here liars.
If you didn't mean to imply that most of the people here arguing for WFH are really trying to preserve their chance to slack off, I would read back over your post and consider changing your language, because it's pretty obvious that most people who read it took it that way. You can't blame other people for misinterpreting you when that misinterpretation is the most common way to read what you wrote. :)
One of my previous teams had little to do with software at all. It was simple office processing. Zero physical presence needed. Now, some managers did want to stand over your should to badger you to 'speed up' review, but I would argue that this only introduced more issues ( you only make more mistakes with someone watching over your shoulder ).
There a lot of jobs like that. Phone customer service comes to mind as well.
Now, there are jobs that can't be remote ( butcher for one ), but we shouldn't pretend its just development that benefits from remote.
One of the many benefits of working from home is that writing great software is heavily dependent on getting into a good "flow". Commuting alone absolutely destroys that for most people. When you work from home you drop so many stages and so much stress out of your morning routine. I find myself being productive within an hour of waking up. That's definitely not the case if I'm forced into an office. Especially if people start chatting me up once I get there (which always happens). Commuting home after a long day is soul destroying as well. It's time stolen from my personal life.
For what it's worth I find it the exact opposite. If I need 8+ hours of uninterrupted 'flow', nothing beats the office. My 'commute' (a 30 minute walk) clears my head, and really helps me switch into 'work mode'. Then I grab a desk in the designated quiet section of the office and I have a clean desk, no distractions and, since I'm in the quiet section, I can be reasonably sure I won't be disturbed all day. At work there is nothing to do but work. If I need something to eat or drink the office cafe will sort me out quickly and efficiently. I can stay in the office until I'm done, then walk away leaving work behind me both physically and metaphorically.
Don't get me wrong, I love working from home as well and never want to go back to the office full time, but home is full of distractions. Everything from cooking lunch, to deciding to quickly throw on a load of laundry to talking with daughter about her day when she comes home from school are all distractions I don't have att the office.
If I had to guess, other than most offices just absolutely sucking ass, this is the nation-wide crux of the entire debate:
> My 'commute' (a 30 minute walk)
Most Americans have a 30 minute drive at best, and state departments of transportation and the federal government are doing everything they possibly can to make sure more cars are sold, more highways are built, and lanes are widened because they'll be damned if someone is going to wake up with no car related debt and walk to work.
No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.
Recently I joined a community input/comment session regarding a $44 million "Smart Lane" here in Columbus. I learned two things:
1) These comment periods are a formality. A state's DOT will never turn down a big project.
2) The state DOTs are focused on metrics like maintaining existing commute times.
> No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.
My city in Kentucky at least has been making all sorts of headway on multiple major "road diet" projects. Many of those projects are probably more expensive in the short term and maybe even in the long term, so it seems good for business too.
These "Road Diets" are amazing: fewer lanes, dedicated turn lanes, dedicated curb space for parking (and plants!). Traffic is safer, oddly slower but ultimately faster (median speeds are down but throughput is higher and accidents generally fewer; all commute times are better than the multi-lane equivalent times despite cars moving individually slower on average; fewer stops and grid blocks).
To maintain fewer lanes at faster throughput, they seem to need a lot more concrete and lot more road painting and that keeps jobs employed.
I don't know how you sell Columbus on the idea, I barely know how we sold ourselves on the idea, and I do know how much controversy it has been for some of the earliest streets to get put on such a "road diet". (Businesses looking at the plans complained that they'd lose a lot of car traffic and thus a lot of business. Results were mostly the opposite: slower median speeds meant more awareness of local businesses people were passing by. More dedicated street parking meant more people actually stopping at businesses. Slower median speeds, with sidewalks more protected by street parking and other furniture, also meant more pedestrian foot traffic, because they felt safer, something once long thought vanished never to return for some of these streets.)
> No state DOT is turning down a lane widening project, or a new highway build, or a "smart lane" because their jobs depend on it, even if it comes at the expense of us all. They really are not departments of transportation but just departments of highways and cars.
I think states DOTs differ pretty widely. In Texas and I imagine Ohio, yeah they're very car oriented. But where I live, a lane widening project was just rejected because of how expensive it would be and instead they are using funding towards improving other transportation solutions that don't involve cars.
In the past CDOT has been heavily car and highway oriented, but that seems to be changing slowly. Maybe other states are also considering different options to cars.
Certainly there are differences, to your point. I don't think there's a huge difference though given that the US is so car-dominated. Good to hear CDOT rejected a highway expansion. We need more wins like that nationally.
The two worst work environments I've been in were an open office situation, where the noise and motion was far too intrusive for me to get anything done, and another place that had a strongly enforced "silence" rule. That was perhaps even worse. The office had no noise at all except for the incessant noise of typing.
I need something in between those two extremes, I think.
Different people have different homes, and different offices have different norms. My home is less distracting than the office, and the environment itself is much less stressful than the office. It seems weird for Google to force the decision instead of trusting employees to make the right choice for them.
I rented a quiet co-working space, instead of working from home or working at the office. That gave me the advantages of choosing my own work area, while still working remotely.
I struggle to work well from home, so renting my own nearby office worked really well for my productivity.
Later I also travelled (pre-COVID) and rented co-working spaces which had great benefits, and certainly bet working from a café or hotel.
This demonstrates the most important difference between In-Office fans and remoters: They ALWAYS have the best possible situations thinkable, far and away better than any average or median.
A 30 minute walking commute is INSANELY rare, as is a quiet section, as even is a office cafe. I'd be far less pissed about forced in-office work if I had any of those things.
It's not insanely rare, but it probably depends on the country. I've moved multiple times and worked in different countries; a 30 minute walk to the office has been quite common for me (or up to 20 minute bike).
The fact that talking to your daughter about her day when she comes home is a nuisance to you, which the office saves you from, is a very interesting detail
Where did I say it was a nuisance? I said it was a distraction. I love talking to my daughter after school, but that doesn't change the fact that my daughter coming home from school also effectively marks the end of that days 'flow'.
"Commuting alone absolutely destroys that for most people."
Commuting is not equal. Short vs Long commutes, commuting where you have to drive, commuting where you physically exert yourself, commuting where you meander through a park or market on the way to the office and leisurely have breakfast on the way... these are all commutes but they might not all be experienced by everyone the same. Some people hate driving to work, other people have a sports car and love it, and some people might not mind sitting in rush hour traffic with some good music and a bong in their lap.
Personally I love a 15-25 minute bike ride to work. Nothing like it to wake up, clear your mind and get energized for the work day, and the ride home can be a furious workout to destress, or slow and blissful. But that is me.
A) Not all commutes are bad
B) Cities should probably be designed to make commuting better (but that may require less cars and more public transportation and better urban planning)
C) Some commutes can be good.
D) Long term consequences of decreased activity and social interaction may not be apparent yet.
I feel like this discussion is missing the hybrid part of the policy. 2 days at home for flow state work and 3 at the office to collaborate doesn't seem crazy. Maybe it should be 2-3 instead of 3-2 for some people, but in my experience the biggest productivity disruptor is meetings. And you’re only getting two “no meetings” days a week anyway. And the biggest downside from working at home is the hit to socializing and collaboration. You’ll hear anecdotes for days from both sides. A hybrid policy addresses both perspectives.
Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy? And on the flip side, if companies want productive employees over the age of 28, and deliberately don’t want to be remote, maybe they should start providing offices instead of desk clusters…
I did the force hybrid thing for a while (team showed up on the same days).
It was awful for productivity. One in-person day per week would have been OK, but the other time in the office was a waste. The only work that got done that day could have been done via a few scheduled 30 minute 1:1’s.
If management must force people into the same spot, I’d suggest considering a “Thursday we grab beers or go hiking, etc at noon” schedule.
It would be better for morale and productivity, and also cheaper than maintaining an office. They could even give everyone a free coworking account.
Yeah, for sure. I can't get anything done in the office anymore. At this point, we just go in once every couple of weeks, when we can all arrange a lunch, and it generally just turns into a: Do a bit of office maintenance, and socialize with coworkers day. I actually quite like it.
This is a great idea and an example of thinking outside the box to actually achieve a goal, rather than cargo-culting the corporate conventional wisdom that collaboration has to be in the office or can't be constrained to a small amount of actual work time, mixed with activities.
> Now if you just want to work for a fully remote company or in a remote role, why not take a job at a place where that’s the philosophy?
Because during COVID a lot of companies started saying that's their new philosophy and are reneging on it now that they feel they can, and a lot of us shuffled around during that time. People hired onto remote teams and are getting rug pulled now.
To my knowledge nobody said they were 100% remote, you are in a remote role, and are now reneging. If they said they’re remote then they’re still remote.
It's completely unreasonable for a company to force you to move, if a company asks that of you start looking for a new job immediately. There are companies out there that respect your personal life and don't want to consume it.
> Because during COVID a lot of companies started saying that's their new philosophy and are reneging on it now that they feel they can, and a lot of us shuffled around during that time. People hired onto remote teams and are getting rug pulled now.
Twitter is one of those companies. Any company that didn't say "you can work remote temporarily", but now wants to force RTO is also going back on their social (and potentially legal) contract with their employees.
I'm trying to clarify my understanding. Is it the case that Twitter has reneged on telling employees they can work fully remote? I have no disagreement with you that there are social and potentially legal problems with companies that have said that. I am just trying to understand if Twitter and more relevantly Google have done that.
They should have never used “permanent” or “forever”. New leaders come in, old leaders go out. Realities change. Should every subsequent CEO be bound by some promise of a prior CEO? Seems unsustainable.
Then if I were a Twitter employee I'd be pretty upset. In terms of Google and Amazon and Apple telling people to come back to the office, though, not sure there's the same grounds for outrage.
If there is value in interacting in the office, hybrid work that has people coming in on random days seems almost like the worst of both worlds. If the value is to get face time with your teammates, then the in office days need to be aligned.
But it sounds like a management problem, if they cannot organize their team to get together on one day. Shouldn't that be easier than just forcing everyone to be in every day?
I don't like hybrid because what I say about ruining flow is still true on the days that you have to come in and even worse, you're forced into the real-estate market by the office vs living where you want and where you can afford.
That should be a discussion with your manager and HR department. Most places assist with relocation expenses. And nobody paid you to move away from the office in the first place.
I WFH and would never work in the office again. If the place I was working demanded that I go into the office, I wouldn't talk to the HR department, I'd find a new remote job.
Hey dcow, maybe they were hired for remote work and are now being forced into hybrid. And absolutely no company is going to help their employees pay for the cost of living in places like Vancouver, San Fran, London. So let's bring the argument back to reality, ok?
Right that was my (slightly ambiguously worded, my bad) point. WFH hasn't materially changed the amount of time I spend in meetings, which ultimately is the thing that pulls me out of flow states aside from typically distracting stuff that can happen in any environment.
Nonsense. Good software is about good looking people looking at the screen, one of them is sitting down and typing while the other are pointing and confidently smiling. No grilled cheese.
You are assuming that all the homes are well equipped to handle good flows. Maybe true in American suburbia with big homes and spare rooms. How about small city apartments shared other people (partner, roommates)? Multi-generational setups? Toddlers at home? I bet most of the workers do not have a proper working set up at home.
I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a partial owner of a company with 50 employees - about half are distributed. We used to meet 4-6x per year F2F pre COVID. Post COVID we’ve met twice in 2 years.
I notice that people are much friendlier after we meet F2F. They remember that there’s a human who they know and have hung out with. This feeling fades as time passes.
I don’t know what the right answer is, and I feel a little hypocritical living abroad and managing my team. But some things are definitely lost by solely working outside the office.
I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. The only thing that is missing for me is the pressure to pretend to want to spend social time with random people I only have contact with because our job responsibilities overlap. I always know there's another person on the other end of the Teams call, there's just less of a facade. All I want from my job is to log in, do my work well, and log off at the end of the day. I don't have holes in my social life that I need an employer to fill.
I didn’t mean to hang out. It’s more that people get frustrated more easily and have less patience. Once they’ve seen each other, their are some warm feelings and friendliness that persist.
We just spent a 3 day weekend at a casino, with food, drinks and some activities. I feel like there’s a big difference in the way people behave towards each other before and after the weekend.
This has been my experience working on a distributed team as well. I think my ideal setup involves getting the team together in person once or twice annually for a few days where the focus is brainstorming/collaborating.
Our company is trialing/thinking about going fully remote, but then having a few big "meetups/workations" every year. Maybe rent a nice cabin (big cabin) for a month, and people are free to show up for a week or more.
You get a little socialization going, you give people the freedom to choose, you still save money in total AND because the "hybrid" isnt randomly distributed, you might actually get all those "useful" communications happening.
I've found this to be the case. But I don't think it has to be face-to-face. Booking a meeting/lunch on zoom where people have fun by playing an online game (https://www.drawasaurus.org/ was my favourite), can do wonderful things for team cohesion in my experience.
Some of the best teams have never seen each other face to face. You shouldn't have to rely on people meeting face to face to be nice to each other. It sounds like you have a larger cultural problem not associated with where people are working if that's an issue.
The noise and interruption problem can be about the same at home: whether it's the spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ...
You can only get quiet time if it is properly managed, and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.
> in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home
The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control. A private space in the office is under the CIO’s control. I’ll let you guess how often they think a private space is worth spending money on.
> The big difference is that the private space in my own home is under my control.
So you have definite control over spouse, the children, the dog, a neighbour, some builders doing work in the street, ...? Must be magical where you live.
I observe this with coworkers every week:
- their special needs offspring needs special attention
- their neighbor is noisy and an Grade A jackass
- cats meowing for minutes
- the wife of someone interfering to assign him chores for lunch time
- i personally am plagued by sirens of medical emergency transports during months when it gets hot under the roof here, multiple times a day / night
What you are describing is inadequate remote working conditions - it will be just as bad as inadequate office working conditions. Adequate ones can be had if you give a crap about your work - get a dedicated room with a closable door, set expectations with your family, soundproof where needed - again not different from setting those kinds of boundaries in an office setting.
That sounds like the worst of both worlds. You're on the hook for all the costs of an office, not just a small uptick in power and data use. You can't put on laundry or chat with your spouse during a break. And you have lost the advantages of in-person communication with your team.
I literally don't see how any of that is different to my coworkers next to me being in meetings all day long and talking loudly, while I'm sitting there are trying to focus. At least at home I can ask my wife to take a kid for a walk because I need to focus for a bit. In the office I can't just tell everyone around me to shut up.
...or you can move yourself. With a big desktop setups perhaps not as much, but grab your laptop and head out someplace else. library? coffee shop? wherever. Working 'remote' I have options as to where to go to get privacy/focus. When I worked in office spaces, there were almost always some distractions that were hard to get away from (either logistically or socially).
Nearly everyone at my work has a proper big desktop workstation because we need the firepower that laptops don't really offer. Which rules out "just moving" and sitting somewhere else temporarily.
The discourse around offices is almost as if they didn't exist before COVID. This:
> in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces
was largely unsuccessful almost everywhere and the trend was for more open, more distracting spaces as time progressed. It was to the point that complaining about open offices & wishing we could complain about cubicles like our predecessors was a tired topic on HN.
Were offices "unsuccessful"? Because I always assumed the open spaces trend was just pablum being served up by Corporate to take us (engineering) down a notch.
The open work spaces thing too allowed for rapid over-hiring without having to have the real estate to back it up.
Not always. You have to include the fad component. Our company isn't cost constrained, nor were we hiring a ton of new talent. Yet we updated our office layout and furnishings 2x in the last 8 years to look "better."
Never underestimate the desire to keep up with the Joneses.
Those huge open plan offices of the 1970s looked amazing in magazine photo-shoots. If you're C-suite suit you can really preside over a room like that.
Like a newsroom bullpen seen from a balcony above, lots of noise, lots of activity.
It's a just bummer if your job is to think carefully about stuff without distraction.
I once worked at a small company in Florida where there were "offices" but the office manager would talk on speaker phone from his office at the top of his lungs all day. I had the headphones on and the only way I could drown him out was to blast music at high volume, or to take my laptop out into the hallway and hunker down, or to invent reasons why I needed to work at home so I could work without those all-day interruptions. The office manager got shirty about that, since they rented me a parking space in an old bank branch about four blocks away from the office; told me I took "a lot of liberties". I got a strong "because I said so!" vibe from that, and I bounced not too long after. Your contributions to this thread read like ChatGPT being used by Business Insider to try and prop up the corporate real estate market.
No office I've ever worked in had private spaces that were usable on a permanent basis by anyone other than senior management (who are thus oblivious to how the rest of their company actually spent their days). And I've been working since 1992.
Private offices, minimal monitoring, high pay, and lots of schedule autonomy, are perks of the higher tiers of management, and, more generally, are markers of upper-middle class norms in a work setting.
Letting programmers have all those things would cause a great deal of class distress among managers ("why, these middles and proles [Fussell's terms] are getting the same perks as me, their superior! Now how are we going to distinguish between those and the upper-middle, at work?") so they try to avoid the ones they can. High pay, can't do much about that (though they do their best); schedule autonomy, not universally available, but in general we do OK there, at least; they've had a fair amount of success keeping us under frequent monitoring that would be seen as an intolerable insult if applied to higher tiers of management ("Agile" has been a huge boon for them); and private offices, ooooh boy, offices, they've managed to all but eliminate them for us, and we helped with the same free-spirit fuck-traditional-office-norms hacker attitude that (on the flip side) also got us some of that schedule autonomy.
IOW we threaten their class security, if you will, and giving us private offices would be a big step in the wrong direction on that front, from their POV, especially since that's the one aspect of upper-middle work perks they've been the most successful at keeping us from accessing.
The "professional class" set of the Fussellian upper-middle has been under steady attack, with only lawyers mostly still hanging on (non-lawyers can't own law practices, is probably the only reason, or they'd be under the thumbs of MBAs and private equity just like doctors are these days) such that higher tiers of management are increasingly the only remaining large group (sans lawyers) who still enjoy an 80s-style upper-middle life at both work and home, and I think they'd like to keep it that way. The last thing they want is a whole bunch of software dorks "leveling up" a class, and becoming their social peers. It was bad enough when the '80s-and-earlier "analysts" were kinda-sorta upper-middle—luckily they nipped that in the bud by combining "analyst" and "programmer" and ensuring the new role tended to get only the latter's social status.
Early in my career, every dev had their own office with a door. That was unbelievably excellent both for people's general outlook and for the quality of work.
After that, it was years and years of cubes. That was less than ideal, but people made it work. Then open offices came into vogue. That was hated by the majority, and the quality (and speed) of work sorely suffered.
Perhaps the compromise position for RTO could be: you have to come to the office, but you get your own actual office.
This is something these companies, who are so eager to have people in the office, could easily change. With space so inexpensive and after the many layoffs, why not add more private offices for those who do come in?
The current push to return to office is because that was the way things were done before. It doesn't seem likely that THIS change would be on management would go with either.
> and in an office it is more manageable to have private spaces instead of open spaces, than it is to have a separated office at home.
It depends on who you work for and where you live. At my last job I refused to go back into the office, because when I was in there the boss would come in regularly to discuss the latest political blog he'd been reading. He's the one in charge of managing the quiet time, and he was a major extrovert who was terrible at it.
Meanwhile at home, I have an 8x8 room that was once a closet and is now my office. It has a child lock on the outside to keep my kids out. I have a set of 37dB ear muffs that fit over my ear buds and block out basically all sound from outside. And I have control over my slack notifications and can ignore them until I'm ready.
I need more quiet time than non-tech management thinks I do, and this way I get to manage it myself instead of making do with whatever management allows me.
Meh. I worked from home while we had a toddler and an infant, now a first grader and pre-schooler. I’m not going to claim it didn’t have its challenges, but even at its worst it was better than commuting. I did some of the best work of my career during COVID lockdown. I was genuinely happy with life.
> This makes me laugh because it's clear that there's a lot of distraction going on there.
No, no. I think you mean there's a lot of creativity and community going on in the background. What you're hearing is serendipitous collaboration popping off like fireworks.
This says more to how shitty calls are. To a group in person, that background noise is hardly noticeable, but it becomes completely debilitating to a call. I'd be interested to dig more in to why, I guess the microphones on laptops are just not as good as our ears at picking up closer noises with priority or something.
This is a huge problem for me! Frequently I can't hear people at all. My team is fully remote from each other, but we're all required to go into one of the company's offices five days a week. The worst of both worlds.
Vacancy rates for commercial real estate are what 20-30%? While the economy continues to grow, so no this narrative about productivity is pure bs.
Every post about how I overhead some conversation, the problem is you not knowing how to manage people. There are field workers, trades, all of India working remotely, always, long before Covid.
Had a 4 hour call to fix a bug , 1 on 1, never got distracted, no one butted in, no one asked to go out for lunch, coffee, had some bs made up management emergency that required everyone. No one told me that x,y,z brought apples and they are in the kitchen. My working day has more working hours than it ever did while living in NYC because as everyone knows ~20% of your waking hours are spent commuting.
Oh I remembered my all time least favorite activity, where we pile into a room to eat team lunch with plastic utensils off paper plates, while someone from some management organization tells us how we should see the world… yeah no thanks. I wonder why is there is no demand for commercial r/e oh that’s right because unless you are a unicorn company or actually physically need to be at a location to perform a task, the vast majority prefers working from home.
Also, in US, landlords outside of huge metro areas and non class A buildings in metro, are throwing out crazy TI credits and building offices for free for a lease. So if you are looking for an office because you have some portion of the workforce that prefers it. A great time to get a new office built out for free, on a very cheap lease. I have clients that are having entire floors redone for free because they just mentioned cancellation/renegotiation of a lease.
For anyone not in the real estate market, "TI" here is "tenant improvement" and basically means all the construction that the owner does to configure the space to the needs of whoever is leasing it
Its not doing great. I know that people that are still holding offices are getting their pick of the litter right now.
"The company below left, so we added their space to the lease and got all the furniture, for 10% of the rate"
"Sub tenant left so we got a great deal on taking over their space as is"
this and this
"We have extra space because 70% are WFH would you like to sub lease it we have 3 other companies here and all the infra setup, plus our break room is nice"
Buildings reporting the empty spaces as being turned / under construction to juke up occupancy rates. All matter of BS to pump numbers. I am not even in the industry and I've seen this stuff first hand.
>Had a 4 hour call to fix a bug , 1 on 1, never got distracted,
So here' what is missing from a lot of modern work. The stuff you're doing requires input from multiple people. The overhead for 6 hrs of actual work is 60 hours of scheduling, meetings, additional people, your-court-my-court.
Meanwhile, semi-spontaneously spending a half day on something because "good progress" is something people hide. what kind of a ridiculously long "meeting" is that?
"Meetings" as a concept, has replaced working with people.
> Had a 4 hour call to fix a bug , 1 on 1, never got distracted, no one butted in, no one asked to go out for lunch, coffee, had some bs made up management emergency that required everyone.
You had a 4 hour call and didn't take a single break for lunch or coffee or even just to stand up and stretch legs?
I can walk around my home office, go downstairs make a coffee without having to navigate society and social structure in the office. Put myself on mute for 5 minutes... Unless you are already hiding away from everyone in the office, good luck doing the same on a floor, and good luck not having someone run up to you to say oh hey can you come take a look at x,y,z.
Not really, they were hired because they were cheap and available. I've seen some great work from our India teams, the main problem is they aren't local so a big communication barrier. WFH people are similar, except no time difference.
I will say. I'm gonna be burned for this here, but... yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.
As a worker I like it! And there are some positives - mainly, you don't have to commute and live in a cheaper place. But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective, and I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while. One thing that's good is that it gives you access to a bigger talent pool, and you can pay people less, because they are happy they can work remote.
I was originally against hybrid, because it's not really one thing or other thing, but now I start to see its positives too.
I keep saying this — as a fairly senior engineer, remote has basically blocked me from actually doing many of the things that made me good at my job.
I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.
Fundamentally, information is the biggest asset you can have on the job, and I lost access to all the information that came from organic, unstructured, ad-hoc, and often passive interactions. Unfortunately, the more structured, proactive alternatives cost a lot more of my time and effort, so it's all around less effective.
> I don't have all my juniors around me, so I can't overhear their conversations, so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble. I can't help people debug problems I'm not aware of, and frustrated grumbling often comes a few steps before actively asking for help. I don't have people from other teams around me, so I can't grab them for coffee/lunch and catch up on what they're doing. I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.
There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc). You may simply have a preference for being around people and using the methodologies you listed here, which is fine enough, but remote doesn’t fundamentally block any of the outcomes you mentioned.
I don't know if that's fair. Consultants were flying "on site" for meetings at expense to clients for decades (for hotels, meals, etc) and the money was worth it, because being in person is, for some people, is more efficient for some forms of collaboration. I feel like we're having battles about the "best" way when they are just different - and the market will show the results.
I've been consulting for well over a decade. I used to fly to visit my clients. During the pandemic they all learned to work remotely and I haven't made a trip since. We actually communicate more than we did before, and it feels like overall everyone is better at communication.
Fair. I was one of those consultants (experts in software being implemented by the local team), though, and - specifically with teams that needed more help and interventions - going onsite was hugely valuable. I'm not saying remote is impossible, but I got much more done when I could sit with people 1-on-1 and build relationships/see what they didn't know to show me.
> Requesting for people to communicate more in group chats instead of direct messages takes 5 seconds.
Requesting something and something actually happening are two very different things.
There is also a meaningful difference between an in-person group chat and a group chat that will remain visible to the whole team for months or years to come.
This request becomes far more than just changing the medium, and requires everyone involved to adjust to the idea that everything they ask can be later analyzed without the context of the moment, and this has a chilling effect on the kinds of things that people are willing to ask. This in turn fundamentally changes the dynamic into something that doesn’t really replace the original junior/senior relationship effectively.
Accomplishing what the parent comment is talking about requires far more than “please use the group chat”.
> Requesting something and something actually happening are two very different things.
i.e., I don't have the respect of the people that are working for me.
I never had issues with people making sure chat remained in public channels.
> There is also a meaningful difference between an in-person group chat and a group chat that will remain visible to the whole team for months or years to come.
One can be referenced later with a simple text search.
The other could have been an email. And will probably end up with people forgetting what exactly was said.
> requires everyone involved to adjust to the idea that everything they ask can be later analyzed without the context of the moment, and this has a chilling effect on the kinds of things that people are willing to ask.
i.e., I work at a toxic company with toxic management.
Because those same people were speaking up regularly during in-person meetings and weren't being judged there.
Also, let's forget about video/audio.
> Accomplishing what the parent comment is talking about requires far more than “please use the group chat.”
Sure. It requires effort. No more so than what was required before. The difference? We blindly accepted what came before as the way things were.
>i.e., I work at a toxic company with toxic management.
>Because those same people were speaking up regularly during in-person meetings and weren't being judged there.
Since there's far less lawyers on this site than devs (naturally), I'll chime in with my .02c. Face to face is king. Don't say anything you wouldn't want your mom, dog, or the news saying when you wake up tomorrow morning. And you'd be surprised the stuff that people will put into writing, even after repeated notice. Ever work in healthcare and have to deal with HIPAA? It's insane how flippantly I've seen patient info shared, like it's not the first thing drilled into you. It doesn't matter if you are Jesus reincarnate, I'm sure you have said some things you wouldn't want to be read out in court.
>Requesting for people to communicate more in group chats instead of direct messages takes 5 seconds.
i just did that to my team and not only our productivity got better, but now everyone knows what everybody is doing (my team is brand new, and the company has this culture where everything is DMd instead of being sent into channels).
Part of the problem is that the tools we have are awful. Using a group chat on teams feels less like a casual chat with the people around you, and more like ringing a bell in the office to give a formal announcement.
I don't think a remote-first approach inherently takes more time and effort, but it requires a culture change.
If you alone are trying to adopt a remote-first strategy I definitely think it will take more of your time and effort, but if your company culture is remote-first I don't think it should.
> I don't think a remote-first approach inherently takes more time and effort, but it requires a culture change.
Culture change requires time and effort.
And without structured guidance shaping the change, progress will not be evenly distributed.
I think the harsh reality is that remote-first does inherently take more time and effort, even if some of that is a one time investment.
The trouble is that this one time investment is difficult to quantify.
I worked remotely for many years prior to the pandemic so I’m not against remote work. But I don’t think it’s fair to claim that it comes at no cost. I did find it incredibly important to still get to the office periodically for team bonding and to catch up on the 100 little hallway conversations that can’t happen remotely.
Not trying to twist your words, but to point out that remote-first really does require inherently more time investment.
I think you’re underselling the impact of the prerequisite culture change, because very few companies are remote-first or even know what a good remote-first strategy looks like.
If a company already has a solid and effective remote culture, great! But this is pretty rare, and can’t be considered a general case. Those companies are also made of people who fit the mold of that remote culture, and I question the merit of generalizing their success to a broader workforce made up of people who weren’t pre-selected for their compatibility.
And to be clear, I’m not saying I don’t think the investment is worthwhile; just necessary and not trivial.
> "upfront investment" is not the same as "inherently takes more time and effort".
We can agree to disagree here, but I just find this to be a rather odd conclusion. I’m not trying to split hairs, but think that “just change the culture” hand waves away a massive undertaking for most orgs, and it’s better to address this head-on than pretend it doesn’t exist.
I don't expect it to work magically without effort on my part. What I'm saying is that it's a tradeoff, and that the tradeoff doesn't really work that well for me.
I'm simultaneously pretty gregarious and pretty introverted. Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me, but being a mostly passive observer and tactically jumping in is much more manageable, and all around a more efficient use of my resources. Work better in a pull- rather than push-based setup, if you will.
> Having to take the lead and proactively arrange for social interactions is exhausting for me
This is definitely the case for me as well. I've set up regular meetings once, to avoid all kinds of discomfort that arise when doing so every time. Though, I understand that such arrangements may not flow as easy as in-person ones for everyone.
> There is nothing here that can’t be addressed in a remote setting, you just need different methodologies (tight feedback loops for juniors, public channels for team comms, etc).
The debate between remote and in-office communication reminds me about the debates around generative vs human made art. Is text messaging "real communication", is a generated painting "real art"?
Depends on what your purpose is. Of course text message isn't equivalent to a face to face meeting, nor is a face to face meeting over zoom the same as a face to face in person.
If the goal of the communication is specific (need requirement X by Y time), text is actually quite probably better (can take time to be concise and clear, use tools catered to the specifics, remove various other subtleties of face to face meetings). If you want to get to know someone or have low specificity communication needs, clearly an in person rendezvous is best.
> Can you be more specific? "Public channels for team comms" -> they explicitly addressed that ("frustrated grumbling").
"Frustrated grumbling" goes to the tight feedback loops, make sure juniors aren't on their own island for too long without a checkin of some sort (if you want to manage things that way, I could also argue for letting juniors flail a bit in some cases but the person I replied to obviously prefers a more micro approach). Public channels were related to the desire to know what others were working on.
Further specifics depend on the dynamics of the team, but the point in there are various relatively easy ways to systematize remote work efficiently.
> Remote forces us to change the way we have been operating for decades. Why should we?
Why should people be forced to continue operating in ways they find suboptimal for a myriad of reasons (commute, distractions, tethering living location/family/friends to job, etc) just because some are unwilling to adapt even though solutions are readily available? The historical status quo is not often a great place to look for arguments for how things should be.
I'm working a job at the moment that's fully remote and where everyone technical on the project is a senior dev. It's a completely different experience to pervious projects I've worked where we had junior devs and where I can relate to what you're saying here.
For me this is the first time I've ever felt far more productive working remotely since I can trust other team members are doing a good job, and when there are blockers or things to discuss it's easy for us to jump on a call and work it out.
I'm not saying there are no drawbacks, but I think for this particular project the pros far outweigh any cons of remote working.
I was very much in the hybrid camp a year ago, but now I think it really depends more on the team and the project you're working on. Some projects I've worked on before I can't even imagine working on from home since they've required a lot of collaboration with non-technical teams. But for projects where the technical work needed is well scoped and where you have strong developers, you might as well just let them work however they please.
I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.
>I wonder if this is why devs have such strong disagreements on this – I doubt there is a right answer here, it just depends on the nature of the work.
It's worth jumping into the HN Looking For Work threads from time to time to get a general picture of the people who use this site. I find it enlightening to realise that dogma about programming that seems foreign to me is mainly coming from people with massively different technical backgrounds. It also explains the webdev defaultism.
Yep. Peek into a thread about web frameworks and you’d think that software architecture never existed, and that very few are actually capable of working without them.
Tech’s skill requirements create a bimodal distribution of jobs, seemingly. Some places manage to break away sufficiently to spend less time dealing with poor code.
You can't work remote as if you were in-office but just have conference calls now. You need to restructure communication and norms a bit, but if you do it can completely address all the thing you brought up.
That's perfectly fine and you can be 100% sure you will find an employer who will be happy to have an employee like you. Many other senior engineers, however, are different and prefer to work in a more structured way. For example, I regularly have scheduled meetings with juniors where we discuss their current work. I make sure they feel at ease and speak their mind so I instantly see when they go wrong. And I make sure everybody in my time has time aside in our calendars for the main work - and that time is the same for all team. We are regularly praised by the management and our teams for how effective we are. And we meet in person every 3 months or so.
Have you tried having an always on video meeting for your team? Our team was fairly similar, and for a time felt like we lost a lot during the lockdown. But an always on team-video meeting really saved us. It has its drawbacks, interruptions become a lot more disruptive and emoting is harder with a smaller face, but there are advantages that more than weigh up for this, instantly sharing the screen with the entire team is really useful, and not having to travel several floors to help people lowers the barrier for helping people in other parts of the organization. And with the always on video meeting people can even drop by to say hello. It also helps focus the team on one thing, which is often a good thing. People can still do their thing on the side, but working as a team on one focused task is a lot easier.
I feel like there's a mid-level sweet spot of independence where remote work is just 100x better than in office - you don't need consistent support, and you don't need to consistently influence/help lots of other people.
But if you need consistent support (juniors) or you need to influence/help others (seniors, managers), then it's such a huge hindrance to getting traction.
I managed several dozen people scattered across Hong Kong, NYC, London and Bangalore. I couldn't even overhear the team at my location because I was often in meetings. Nearly everything was done async, with weekly video calls. The main cultural challenge was getting people to IM frequently and casually like gamers on discord.
From a CS angle, we know async is more efficient than synchronous code, but requires very careful implementation. Same for people. It works for OSS volunteers, it can certainly work for full-time employees.
None of these issues couldn't be addressed in remote teams. It's not as if you can just take an office culture, make everyone be remote overnight, and have everything continue to chug along exactly the same as if nothing happened. Remote does require some adaptations. But in my experience, ultimately remote work is a drastic increase of quality of life without any decrease in productivity.
My company has worked pretty hard imo to reduce silo-ization caused by WFH. It has not worked. Everyone complains that about the stuff the parent did. Maybe our management is incompetent, but management isn't changing at this point. Some companies just don't have what it takes to transition to wfh, and I'd say the bigger the company the more likely that is.
I've still hit some of these same issues during 'co-location' periods. I'm somewhat comparing apples/oranges, but I've been at some large-ish orgs (1000s of employees colocated) and my experience was info-hoarding was pretty string outside a small network of the 'inner-circle'. Each dept had a few of these, and you'd routinely get hit with stuff out of left-field that apparently had "been in the works" for "some time", but the requests/items/issues were fundamentally flawed (logic, whatever). 30 minutes of talking with someone outside the inner circle would have helped, but... info is power. Hoarding it helps some people more than others.
I saw it happening in a 'remote' setup a few years back, except, it wasn't as intentional as it was in co-located work environments. It was more a natural consequence of people being remote. Issues/delays that might have been more naturally noticed in f2f settings lingered for months before surfacing. And... the more I dug, the more I was noticing this. More teams separated and working independently with few 'info hoarders' acting as informal intermediaries. There wasn't actual info hoarding with a political motivation behind it, but it happened all the same. Some aspects of working in that team were far better than '9-5 @ office' of 20 years ago, others were worse.
I'm not a "remote work at all costs" person, but also not a "return to shared office at all costs". Flexibility/choices I think are the optimal setup. Not everyone has a great home to work from. Many people work better with routine and physical space between 'home' and 'work'. We do, indeed, often get new info/ideas from the proverbial water cooler chats. There's no one 'best' way for people to get work done, and not one 'best way' for people to work together. My 'best' working style even changes depending on the skills and personalities of the other folks I'm working with.
I used to do this "intercepting bad ideas" out of habit, but often the people who had the bad ideas had more senior job titles and salaries than me. It got me in a lot of trouble, mostly because I gained a reputation for being very knowledgeable (invited to everything) and for making supposed seniors look bad. They were not actually senior, the place just didn't pay enough and any actual experienced people were incidental and often didn't hold the title.
I eventually had to leave because I turned into a human Confluence replacement and architect on top of my existing work and still was one of the worst paid people (with little to do about that, management hates "mercenaries"). So I'm very happy I no longer feel compelled to do this working remote anymore, except when people abuse our platform.
There's some rules one can add when working in a remote setting to address these sorts of issues, for example set a time limit for when an Engineer needs to engage with their team and ask a question, 30 mins/1 hour/2 hours (depending on your culture and allowance for investigation) max. This ensures they're not spinning their wheels and allows them time to investigate/learn while ensuring they reach out to their team and share the situation to get the necessary feedback/discussions to move forward. This has the additional benefit of not having every minor issue be answered by colleagues, increasing the amount of learning and work of the individual Engineer versus offloading to their peers unnecessarily.
Organizing and growing teams is a challenge no matter what the environment, especially for a group that trends introvert. It is hard, whether in office, hybrid, remote, or mixed.
It is hard enough that it seems to me that people pick a side and then stop thinking about how to make the other options work - because why would you? If you picked iOS, why would you waste your precious time thinking about how you'd do it on Android?
But if you're not thinking about how to solve the problems you perceive in remote work, it's not useful to announce your problems with it as if that is any kind of conclusive argument. You haven't solved the problem, but that doesn't mean the problem can't be solved.
Another problem is that many companies are doing hybrid, and that means 40% of the time spent remote. Do the juniors just not get help on those days? Do they just "talk themselves into trouble" without the talking? If we can answer these questions for the two remote days, we can answer them for five remote days.
>I used to have a couple of PMs from other teams who regularly came to me for help because their engineers weren't great at talking to non-technical people.
Great. You're one of these talky people. Lucky you! We're not all like that. Let's see if we can be friends rather than competitors/enemies.
Good point. I haven't even considered that overhearing "fuck this stupid bulllshit" and helping them out is much less friction than a junior clumsily writing out the issue they are facing (and overcoming the urge not to ask for help in the first place)
Our cultural norm is to have 90% of 1:1 communication in team specific chatrooms to let other team members chime in. This works best if everyone is remote or in separate offices. People in the same office obviously prefer direct communication, but I find this harmful if done extensively. My team has always been geographically diverse so strangely going more remote helped overall team communication.
> so I can't jump in when they talk themselves into trouble.
Why cant you use standups to give updates and then take it offline if anyone is struggling?
You seem to be having some kind of Messiah complex where people always need you for help. If you leave the company tomorrow, the company will do just fine without you.
I'm going to get downvoted by the managers, but chances are, your team is doing just fine, but you can't keep up with that remotely.
When you're in the meeting, everyone politely explains to you what they're doing and they say "yes" to your ideas, so you feel like you're making progress.
But when they actually need to do focused work, which you don't want to know the details of because it's too hard, they do far better outside of an oxygen-deprived, loud office that they need to commute to.
This. Most of my interactions with managers are about explaining to them why I am doing what I am doing. Once in a while, they give valuable information.
I definitely don't need to be onsite everyday to keep up-to-date with a manager. One call a week is already a luxury, some interactions via chat (where I can report some progress and stuff).
Mostly it's managers who want to see their team everyday and talk to them, I guess because it makes them feel like they are managing?
I switched from a technical position to a manager one one year ago. My team is remote mostly, myself included in different countries/continents. I do travel to the office to meet colleagues going to the office and having face-to-face time with some.
I don't need to see my team everyday but I do need to have a vision of what they are doing and busy with because we are working on a lot of different projects, pursuing sales opportunities and trying to balance the work based on skills/time available/opportunities to learn or emergencies. So I tend to do 1 team meeting weekly and weeklies with most of the time on the side at least, track project on slack/jira/crm and try to have a board view of my team while being read to deep-dive when needed.
Do I like being on site? Yes but mostly to talk with project manager and product owner, it is more easier to brainstorm/have meaningful discussions in a semi-informal setting of a coffee. For technical colleagues on my team, it is different depending on the tasks : creative/architecture/whatever or routine/operational.
Can't see my team on site everyday anyway but would prefer for some specific type of interaction.
Well that's just me trying to find my way in management so grain of salt and personal bias and imposter syndrome warning :)
That sounds very presumptuous, which is a pity because your message is valuable, but the presumptuousness implies that your opinion has absolutely no value.
The value in your comment is on bringing one aspect that makes the situation more "grey", but you lose it all by then depicting the situation as "managers are useless and devs don't need them", which is very black-and-white.
I'm not a manager and I'm not a dev (I work with data and often ended up coding my own system that sometimes ended up in production against my will), but I have observed a lot of devs who were saying "I'm doing fine on my own", and they were convinced it's the case, and ... they were not doing fine.
Some red flags are devs that complains that "the requirements are not clear" or "the company seems to not care about my effort". Sometimes it is true, but I've observed a lot of the time the same people also saying "just give me some requirements that I can follow step by step instead of explaining the bigger picture, I don't care of what this other team do, I'm busy" or "I redirect all the company-wide meeting invites directly to the bin folder" or "when I go into details of the code, the manager don't get it because it's too hard, but when the manager explains their needs and why it makes sense, I don't get it because I'm wayyyy too smart" or "when I go into details of the code, the manager don't get it because it's too hard, but when someone talks to me about something else than code, they have to learn to adapt to their audience and be happy that I pretend to listen to their boring work tasks".
They are truly thinking the problem is the others and incapable to even imagine their mentality is the problem.
Devs need managers who... code. This is the only way they can understand the underlying work. Otherwise their usefulness is significantly diminished.
The fact that the OP thinks you move the needle primarily by having great meetings together, and leaves out the engineering aspect completely makes it seem like he's the out of touch "ideas" manager, and for this archetype, the office is indeed a more comfortable environment - you can have coffee with everyone whenever you like.
As I've said, I'm coding and I understood perfectly the code of the devs I was working with, and yet, what OP said correspond to what I have observed sometimes.
This demonstrates that your logic "OP reaches this conclusion, so it's the proof that he does not understand the code, which is the problem" is wrong. If this logic was true, who do you explain that someone like me, who clearly understands the code (I've reviewed it, I've modified it, I've put stuffs in production integrating with their system, ...), agrees with some of OP's considerations?
When reading your comment, it is difficult to not be drawn to the idea that you are one of those persons I was mentioning, who are not understanding other employees needs and point-of-view and who interpret systematically any communication failing as "the other person's fault".
Engineering is so much more than code. Yes, managers need to have some part of their work in the trenches but it really is the case that many serious engineering problems are best tackled through meetings and documents rather than sitting down and sending PRs.
You might say that, but someone who doesn't know the principles will consistently produce misguided designs, and won't understand why certain options are better.
Meetings with such a person will cause the engineers to work around them instead of being lead by them. There's also no reason such meetings have to happen everyday at the office.
Most serious advancements are produced by single contributors tackling parts of the problem. Commitees are a place of power struggle, not technical progress.
Not sure why you are talking about "someone who doesn't know the principles" to a message that explicitly says "Yes, managers need to have some part of their work in the trenches".
I've been in meetings that were power struggle without any progress, I've also been in meetings that were really useful to solve the problem, way faster than the contributors shooting in the dark because they think they too smart to dialogue. The direction of the meeting depends way more of the mentality of the participants and on their skill to solve problems smartly than of the manager. If you go to the meeting with in mind the idea that the meeting is useless, obviously, you will stir it in the wrong direction (and apparently, you are prone to jump to the first cliché conclusion, I can imagine that you will interpret any contribution in the worst way possible). It does not mean that with participants with a better mentality, the meeting would not have been 10x faster than with single contributors tackling parts of the problem.
Don't get me wrong, shitty meetings happen. But if all the meeting you've been were shitty, maybe the problem is on your side. And if you always end up with the bad manager, it may also be that, with your attitude, you are not worth the time of a good one (or not, but at least do not exclude this possibility just because you dislike it)
I work in a hardware startup. I can feel the difference between sitting in my office and in the workshop. The synergy of having hardware people walk by you and clarify assumptions is priceless. I experienced the same in a crypto startup where you similarly have highly specialised skill sets that need to be transferred to “mortal programmers” like me. Sitting at home is great for concentration, but you lose the synergies.
I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101, not synergy of being around each other. Having a good culture around replying people needing help in a timely fashion (instead of letting it slide for days) is important.
To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help.
The culture of communication needs to change when people work remotely, that's the main difference. It's nice because now you can't just interrupt people with a tap on the shoulder, you need to ask for their time to interrupt someone.
Yes, at cost to latency, bandwidth and meeting time (you don’t as easily make 30 second video calls as you nag the person across the monitor).
> conversations about topics tangentially related
Not just that. Conversations about topics that are the responsibility of your colleagues but you still need to understand and challenge.
> communication needs to change when people work remotely
It’s totally possible, but requires a level of written clarity that few programmers can bother. FOSS is fully remote for the most, and it depends on a lot of textual protocols.
The more your job is cut out, the more runway your employer has, the less important you need quick communication.
In any R&D, being present is really beneficial. And office chatter is at the same time insanely annoying. Stand ups that drag into half hours, “let’s break everyone’s flow for a group announcement”, people who wanna smalltalk.
Best of both worlds is a mixture, when the circumstances permit it.
Wearing headphones and avoiding eye contact does wonders — my boss really picks up when I don’t want to talk.
> To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine, or water cooler, conversations about topics tangentially related to something you're working on/have worked on or know about and can easily chime in and help.
Sometimes I think remote workers could use a new kind of watercooler. Maybe an online game everyone can drop into and play for bit while communicating over voice and chat? I guess not a lot of companies would be happy to install a bunch of time wasting network games, but I've worked on teams that ended up doing that while in the office anyway and it was great for getting to know people and talking about random things. Productivity obsessed people might hate it, but is hanging out in a FPS or MMO any different than standing around distracting others talking about sports with your buddy for 40 minutes every afternoon? Virtual workers need virtual spaces to gather at and a reason to want to go there.
What about a brave suggestion to make all work chat communication public to all employees. This would allow you to just randomly come across interesting conversations (tags, keywords, etc..) your coworkers have without inviting you. If on the other hand someone wants their communication explicitly private, there could be a toggle in chat app to enable that. Like you don't discuss sensitive topics near the coffee machine and just move to a meeting room.
No this is a terrible idea. Spoken conversations are different to chats. For one the very fact that they're not searchable after the fact makes everyone more relaxed and not worry so much about saying something wrong that could get back to them later.
For another, spoken conversations are ephemeral but also point in time. Archived chats need to then be cross-referenced with time and date to check if those chats are still relevant. If partially relevant, which parts can or must be excised?
> I don't understand, you can still clarify assumptions via chat, or grab someone when they're available for a quick voice chat if writing a wall of text will be unbearable or inefficient. That's communication 101
Most people are super duper slow typers.
Remote is less efficient unless most/all of your staff can touch type at a high rate of speed.
I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.
> I don't hire people who can't type, but most people never learned.
Do you require formal touch typing explicitly, or a certain minimum wpm (how fast?), or both? Do you include iportant charcters (for coding) in the test?
typing speed for coding is irrelevant. the bottleneck with coding is not data entry.
the important thing is that they can type at a high rate of speed. i personally type at around 120wpm which is excessive, but anyone who doesn't type 40-50wpm is obviously not sufficiently skilled as a remote worker.
>To me the only thing lost when WFH vs working in the office are the random conversations you eventually pick up when passing by the coffee machine
The way to get these is to basically ban private conversations. Have everything as a thread in Slack or somewhere, create topic channels where people can actually join these conversations
You want to get more conversations by banning conversations? That makes no sense.
We are not machines that convert money (or food/coffee) into code. Social contexts matter, there are personalities behind each face. If you understand the context of your co-workers then it's easier to understand online communication (since most non-verbal communication that happens in person is lost over online channels). Meeting in person sometimes just makes online communication more effective.
Often people will default to DMs for things, which makes it appear like no one is chatting and isolates these casual chats to 1:1 DMs.
If you encourage these kind of conversations to happen in channels (Public or private), other people can jump into the conversation.
I've seen the difference it makes when everything is done in public channels instead of DMs. Everything feels more lively and you interact with your team a lot more. Everything in DMs feels isolating.
Banning private conversations gets you fewer conversations. It's intimidating to talk in front of a lot of people. Even moreso without the trust built up from a bunch of in person interactions.
It would help if there were an easier way to convert a short 1:1 chat into a public thread with a consent click on each side though.
If there were better communication tools than slack I think I'd enjoy WFH more but I find that the commonly used tools dehumanize the process - there's 0 adjustments (like this one) to accomodate psychological safety and the tools are built around transactionality.
> Is it worth the price of mass daily commuting on the wealth and mental health of employees, and on the planet?
That's very context specific. In many cities, employees commuting by public transport to a central location, rather than all individually heating/cooling their houses, is a plus for the planet and wealth of employees. For many people (including me) it's also good for mental health.
This is quite the framing. The company gets paid for producing human value to customers, and unless you're willing to take a pay cut to work remote (oh, you aren't? I see.) the cost there is dominated by employee wages, taxes, social safety net (as meagre as it is here in the US).
Sure, the office costs nonzero dollars and so does commuting - but framing it as morality is misguided. A company can o ly seek to produce customer value in a capital efficient manner, it is up to us (the customer) to value things correctly.
Are you willing to do the work to drop Google services because they want to work from the office and do all that bad stuff?
If you aren't, making people work from the office is the easy choice, their product gets marginally better for very low marginal costs.
The didn't frame it as morality - they framed it as an economic and social costs. There is nothing in your response that convinces me that those costs are worth it.
During this time I listen to podcasts, music, call people, and think.
I will be happy to have a remote-friendly job, e.g. when our systems are deployed in dozens of physical locations throughout the country, the DevOps role is essentially only possible as remote. But remote was just not a high priority for me this time. I really enjoy showing up. I'm not very social outside of work.
It comes down to what kind of problems one is trying to solve. Innovation, 0 to 1 product stage (even 1-10 ones) is not conducive to remote. Whereas 'steady state' companies, where things are streamlined and most is about execution remote can work - no wonder call centers have gone and staying remote.
Similarly for people - young employees in 0-1 or 1-10 career stage cannot thrive in remote.
> Managing a team remotely requires different skills and greater trust. But it's still easily done.
Managing a team, remotely or otherwise, is not "easily done". If you find it easy you're either strongly underestimating your abilities or not doing your job right.
He is talking about the difference in difficulty of local vs remote, not the difficulty of managing full stop.
And he is right, managing remotely is a minimal change. I've been managing and working with people remotely for years, as has everyone who deals with coworkers not in the same office as they are.
It doesn't matter to me if they are in an office in another country or in their jammies at home in that same country, they are thousands of miles away from me.
So I would not say "that's a manager problem": that's everyone problem, everyone needs to change their way of working and communicating. The manager, but also the person being managed (unfortunately, a common dev mentality is to blame everyone else first)
> I see how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while.
I've worked remotely for years before COVID and these meetups are always hyper productive.
I'm also burned out and need to sleep for a week straight afterwards.
Just because people get motivated seeing each other once in a while doesn't mean that's sustainable if they were in an office.
To me, working remotely was less effective in the beginning, it uncovered undiagnosed ADHD and after dealing with that I'm doing far better than I ever did in an office.
Office work is fine if you prefer it, working from home requires a lifestyle and an office space to make it work, something not everyone can manage.
But that doesn't make it worse at all, and as others have said, it requires different management skills, if you haven't picked them up, you probably won't see the benefits from your perspective because you're not letting your team work properly.
As a fellow ADHD’er and soon remote worker could you share any ADHD specific tips to be successful?
I’m both excited and hesitant as Remote work should let me work when I’m productive more (ie evenings) with exercise and chores in the afternoon “deadzones”, etc. That and not spending energy masking in an office environment.
However there classic adhd problems to contend with like keeping schedule, etc. I also find I need people to stimulate me. I’ve been thinking of a coworker spot in addition to my home office.
Not the person you asked, but, ADHD/ADD covers quite a lot, and what works for some might have adverse effect for others. It's not uncommon to be extremely focused and productive on certain tasks, then struggle immensely with distractions and procrastination for other tasks. I say immensely, because this applies to some degree to everyone.
I too felt I was only productive during certain times and deadzones. But, it turns out, I just need to be left alone to focus. Which not only means not being disturbed by others, but also not so easily doing it myself by wanting to interact with others. If no one else is working, nothing to do but focus. This same effect made working in an office exhausting.
I now work 40%, exclusively remote, and I get more done than I did at 100%. Some weeks by a factor of 2. "How is that possible?", consider that under normal office hours, I would clock in-the-zone productive work to about 2-4 hours. Remote: 7-11 hours. A bad week at the office: 10 hours, two good days at home: 20 hours.
"Yeah, but that's just you sucking at working in an office environment". Indeed. And there are dozens of us. Dozens! A good manager should strive to get the best value out of their workers.
Thanks! That's helpful to hear and goes along with what I've been thinking about myself.
It seems to me that many ADHDers work better with a few intense focused periods / days per week with more off days. Unfortunately in an office setting its almost impossible to achieve.
I'm looking forward to (hopefully) being able to do more fun things on off days than spending so much energy trying to look or be productive in an office!
Maybe just me, but I actually find I have an easier time staying focused when I'm away from my desk with just my laptop.
Multiple screens are great, and sometimes I have good success for a while after going back to my desk with its nice big monitor and all that after I get into a flow on my laptop, but when I really need to focus and am having trouble, oddly enough, just walking to another room (or a coffee shop, or whatever) and sitting down with only my laptop often gives me a good kick-start.
Dunno why. I'd go with "multiple screens = distracting" except that I mostly focus on my main screen when I'm at my desk, so I don't think that's it. The change might just break distraction loops (ahem, visiting HN) or something. Or maybe I can't fool myself with "well, work stuff is up on the other monitor..." Not sure.
> Or maybe I can't fool myself with "well, work stuff is up on the other monitor..." Not sure.
Major downside of being creative and quick thinking... our brains are really good at tricking ourselves. ;)
I've been using a LG C2 42" OLED as a monitor combined with a lazy boy in my home office. It's been pretty nice! Though I totally feel the bit about taking a small screen to a cafe when I really need to focus.
I'm not a manager and agree that in an office I'm more productive, but at home I'm much cheaper for the company and the company gets more for their money.
Realistically at Google I'd probably be an L5 or L6 software engineer so let's say I'd make somewhere around 400k USD. Working from home in Spain I make 80k euros and I cost the company around 92k euros with taxes, so let's round it up and say I cost to the company 100k USD per year.
I'm not 4 times less productive for working in a small town in the middle of nowhere in Spain, so even if I'm not in my peak productivity I'd say the company gets more for their money.
Regarding what to do, the most important thing is to find a company willing to pay that amount.
1- Foreign companies usually pay more money than local ones, specially American. Obviously there are exceptions but generally speaking avoid them.
2- Outsourcing companies (the so called "cárnicas") usually are the worst places to work, for salary and for conditions in general... Usually companies where you build/maintain the product pay more.
3- For individual contributors technology matters a lot. Kubernetes pays well, crypto pays unreasonable amounts, rust in general is very well paid as well, AI, etc. Find your niche.
4- Experience matters more than education and open source contributions raise your value a lot.
I'd say those are the main factors that will determine a position's salary, so it's a matter of finding the right position and being the best candidate *for that position*.
As for the technology I've been doing kubernetes for about 8 years now (that's before 1.0 was released). For this experience my salary is not insane at all, counting bonus and stock I was making about 35% more in my previous job, but I was quite tired of being a sysadmin and moved back to programming and that involved doing a pay cut.
> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective
As a manager I can't disagree more.
Remote really is a horses for courses situation.
Practical example: my younger brother worked as a designer for a company that manufactured light steel frames. Their USP was that their design office was attached to their factory, so they were able to provide better designs with a faster turnaround on manufacturing. Despite living a 20 minute drive from his office, he felt that his ability to have these conversations ad-hoc helped him do his job better. Slack would never work because the lads on the floor were never going to pop that up. Also, it physically can't replace him going onto the factory floor to see what a problem was and being able to adapt his designs. He'd occasionally go on-site for construction issues but this, naturally, is a case where the site has to be away from the office; it might be on the other side of the UK.
In contrast, I'm a manager at a fully remote software company (a very successful software company, I might add). The simple truth is that most of our work can be handled remotely. The biggest challenge is getting the right people together. This isn't a remote/office issue, though. I saw this in my office-based role previously, as well as hearing it from all my (office-based) friends.
If you have something in software engineering that you feel requires people to be fully in-office, please raise it and I'll try to outline how we manage that.
This, we have been working remotely for almost 10 years. You can be as effective as in the office and even better, but it also depends on the type of work you do.
This is a mixed bag. Remote work can be less effective if you don't have the right people. Employees who can sustainably work remote and generally keep their shit together without being babysat via Teams every day are surprisingly difficult to find. I am starting to think the "10x unicorn" is more common than the employee that you can trust to autonomously get their work done while at home.
Certainly, everyone on HN (and during the interview) will spin the most elaborate tales about how they are an exemplar of Christ and enumerate all of the virtues of their home office/life separation. But, many of us know how these things really unfold in the following weeks and months. I am a human too. I fuck off periodically and am probably borderline disqualified from working remote per my own criteria. This is really hard to do right over long timeframes.
I've been at it for a decade now and I still don't have any perfect answers, aside from sending 100% of the team back to the office 5 days a week. For whatever reason, both extremes are the only suitable option for my brain. The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.
Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only? We all have our ideal way of working and it is quite individual, by forcing one over the other we may get consistency but not best performance. In any case, this is in my view a power game. Now that market is soft let’s take advantage of it. Would love to see what happens when the wheel turns the other way around. Suddenly remote will be making sense again. On my end, I am only considering explicitly remote positions from now on. For what it’s worth, what confuses me is not the way of working itself but the expectation that I can switch from one to the other and change all the rest of my life, at the whim of strategy of the month.
> Don’t you see a problem when that decision is being made on the basis of one of the brains only?
It's not one brain making any decision here. There is strong consensus in our organization that remote workers are extremely difficult to manage relative to in-office employees. "Not best performance" is amazing if you are getting anything at all.
You're absolutely right that it's about power/control/domination. For better or worse, you have to force many humans into an office context before any productivity is possible. I know we like to believe every human is capable of completely unfettered WFH in the tech industry, but the world simply doesn't work this way.
It is surprising though that when power was the other way around, and remote was The way, productivity was still humming along. Something does not add up. I know how the world works, let’s not rationalise “domination”. I think I would not willingly work for anyone seeing himself as dominating me… even if they define it as just the way the world works and everyone does it.
I think the major difference here is that there are 2 flavors of WFH employee: Pre and post covid. Covid-era WFH was conducted with reckless abandon (out of necessity). Anyone and everyone was 100% qualified to work remotely because that was the only possible way.
Pre-covid WFH employees were hired among a backdrop of "most people still work in an office", so there were a lot of extra special precautions taken throughout. Those hiring remote employees wanted to hire remote employees. They weren't forced to.
Taken together, you now have a marketplace of workers where you get a radically different outcome depending on their "initial conditions".
That still does not address my point. Regardless initial conditions, during Covid, productivity was not impacted. So the “unqualified” remote workers still did fine. The question is what has changed since Covid, and what has changed is the clarity of employers direction with regards to working arrangements. That domination will come at a cost when it is measured by physical presence rather than delivery. In a sense it is also easier to just show up and do less. Let alone the confusion out of the fact that remote enabled geographic spread which now means that you start getting wrong way risk on enforcement and assertion of dominance. My argument is that in reality the world works in more mysterious ways than at face value.
This is a general statement about the economy that is plausibly true, but doesn't apply to all companies because different companies have access to different parts of the labor pool depending on pay, industry, and working conditions.
The kind of talent available to Facebook is very different from what's available to a mid-size insurance agency in Nebraska. I know for a fact that some of those companies in drawing from the low end of the talent pool saw their productivity fall into the dumpster during the mandated WFH period.
This doesn't make any sense. From a management perspective, it should be easy to understand the scope of work from a high level. You should be able to track progress. If employees aren't delivering then try to understand why. If they can't deliver without someone breathing down their neck then the answer is to get rid of them, not create an environment where you can breathe down their neck more effectively.
> If they can't deliver without someone breathing down their neck then the answer is to get rid of them
Welcome back to my first point. It's hard to find people to replace this person who won't wind up in the exact same scenario. The trustworthy remote workers are in the minority. Until we all accept this it's going to be a really rough ride.
Perhaps the wide spectrum of takes on this boils down to the complexity of the underlying business. If you are running the equivalent of a B2B McD restaurant, I can understand how the bottom-barrel WFH employee & management techniques are viable.
>The hybrid shit in the middle with all the context switching drives me absolutely bananas. Get into the pool, or get out of the pool. You cannot exist in a superposition of org chart and hope to survive long term.
We did this forever! If you were ever on-call or had to remote in from home, you were hybrid. WFH has always been supported by employers - as long as it was free.
People will say that remote work lets them focus / write code or whatever, but that's not where the real work happens (or at least, it's only a tiny part of the real work).
The real important work happens when you can play the politics games, identify key players, uncover closely held secret institutional knowledge, and reach across silos to make projects succeed. You need to bypass the red tape and figure out how to get other people to complete the things that are blocking you. You need a way to back-channel delegate things when there is no official chain to do it properly.
Trying to deal with organizational dysfunction is always a challenge, but it's a skillset that any truly productive employee needs. It's hard enough in person - remotely is almost impossible. You won't organically find the right people in a zoom meeting and you definitely won't convince them to help you that way (and vice-versa).
You might think "well my organization isn't dysfunctional!" - well you'd be wrong. All organizations are dysfunctional, it's a matter of degrees and how well the dysfunction can be worked around.
Exactly. Only very little part of doing work is the coding. Yes you need that, but it's not _all_.
And when working remotely, what I see is that even good coders disappear "in the zone" for far too long... endlessly optimizing some unimportant part of code that doesn't ultimately matter, sometimes creating even worse code that was there at the first place.
And then you feel bad that you say "hey but this new version is horrible" when you know the guy worked on it for a week.
Okay it's doable remote, but it's harder. That's why I say "it's more effective to be not remote".
As a worker, I get it, I hate commute too and I hate not being with my family. But, when the company fails because the competition is just faster and can build things better faster, you won't get a job anymore. So, yeah, I am not for full remote.
> Only very little part of doing work is the coding.
I'm glad that I can get away with doing the very little part of work which is coding.
I have zero interest in "reaching across silos", "identifying key players" or "uncovering hidden organizational knowledge". This is the type of thing that a certain personality type might be interested in and it's not me.
I know that this puts me at a certain peg with regard to promotion possibilities. I don't care. I am not going to force myself into doing things I don't like in order to climb the corporate ladder.
There are definitely places where you can fit into such a role, but you need other people you're working with to do the grunt work and make sure you're aligned with what matters to the org.
If you don't have somebody doing that, you risk being stuck on dead-end projects or working on code that doesn't align with business needs, which can put you at risk when it's layoff time (fairly or not).
So even if it's not you doing that part, somebody has to, and if that "somebody" is also fully remote they'll probably have a tougher time navigating everything themselves, which means they're less likely to keep you focused on high visibility, valuable, and successful projects.
I'm a big believer of enabling people to perform their best, which means accomodating their needs. If someone has a later circadian clock I'm not going to set up a meeting at 9AM with them.
That's the same for work environment, neither remote or in-person is "better" but they are for some people. You will always have people who only excel remotely and people who excel and thrive in-person. Mandating one specific environment is not efficient in my view.
I've always followed this and generated hundreds of millons in value through the years so I guess it works.
I don't think it's globally far less effective. I think it's particularly less effective when you need constant communication, say being next to your teammates throughout the day, or when the people are really unmotivated and they won't work unless they're being constantly physically monitored.
As someone who's in a startup and is very motivated, with coworkers who are experts in their area and there's little overlap in skillset, so that everyone knows what they need to do and do it well, without having to constantly synchronize with what each other is doing, I strongly doubt someone would be more effective than me simply because they're going to an office. Specially if they have a long commute and a family.
Meeting together once in a while is very different than either hybrid or in-office. I once worked at a small all-remote startup spanning from the west coast of the US to Eastern Africa. Yes, we all met in person for a week several times per year. That didn’t mean 3+ days per week in office.
And yes that company is still around and doing fine several years later even now. My last information on their in-person meetings is itself years old now, but when they got too big to have everyone meet in person together, they still continued the same principle, just in appropriately sized subgroups.
Perhaps you're a fantastic on-site manager. But you should consider the probability (from what I've read) that remote management isn't in your toolkit ... and it is a distinct skill.
Do you mean to ask if I sent three of my colleagues on a multi-year doctorate research program for a question that everybody seems to already know the answer to and is in agreement, or if I let my team work on my product?
Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :)
Let me tell you that the history of statistics is littered with unsound, but plausible looking decisions, to which "everyone already knew the answer".
One example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survivorship_bias
So yes, that's exactly what I mean. Though if they need multi-year training for a simple A/B test, then you should fire them :)
> Sounds like you're a decision maker and you told like being told your decision are being made on a fragile basis. :)
I have bad news for you if you think this doesn't apply to like 99% of of management decisions (and product, and...). Even, and perhaps especially, the ones that are trying to be "data driven": usually the data's shit, but everyone just pretends it isn't because they don't want to spend the time and money to do it right.
The "modern" "scientific" "data-driven" business world mostly runs on hunches and prejudice.
If it was so simple, everyone would be doing it correctly. Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done. What you have done is talk down to someone else. All in all, I think your entire argument would be a lot more sympathetic if you made it by giving a concrete example of your own beliefs (what do? Is that really simple?), otherwise you will have to get used to folks not listening to you.
> Even you don't give a simple account of what needs to be done.
Fair enough - though I did mention a few basic things like A/B testing and survival bias (trying to being aware of one's own cognitive biases is the first step in making better decisions; to be aware means you first have to know them).
And yes, it is not trivial at all and dependent on the context.
The best and simplest starting point would be to make a list of potential confounding variables (I mentioned a few of them) and then just looking at the R^2 statistic.
That already should point him in the right direction.
I was less bothered that his methodology wasn't 100% correct, but rather by casually making a statistically unsound decision which has a big effect on people's lives, so getting it right is important - and then when called out dismissing it.
I have a lot of sympathy for people honestly trying to make decisions rigorously and getting it wrong; but you have to try.
It’s absolutely less effective for the majority of organizations and engineers. Most of the engineers claiming they’re more effective aren’t actually. They may get to do the part they like more (though in my experience that’s not programming despite their claims, that’s goofing off on HN or doing their laundry), but that’s not the same thing as being more effective for the organization as a whole.
(And sure you can blame it all on “managers” and how they should be better in all kinds of ways, but that doesn’t change the fact that remote, for most organizations and most engineers, is less effective as things stand today.)
This comment claims to be able to tell, but doesn't mention any attempt to measure.
Most attempts to measure that I've read about find increased productivity with remote work. Do you believe your organization has circumstances that cause it to buck the trend, or that those measurements are flawed?
I don't want to take a side in this argument (pro remote vs offsite vs hybrid), but productivity measurement in agile software development is hard and I have never seen it done well, so it's hard to trust these measurements with this decision.
Another issue is the author's conscious and unconscious hidden biases and agendas. If a research is ordered by a video chat software company, you bet the result will be different than if it's paid for by a coworking space provider.
Similarly, you'll have a different result if it's done by a SF company who needs to justify their expenses vs. by a remote team headed by a manager from the woods in Wyoming.
By the third citation, you lose the source of the study, only have the clickbait outcomes like "86% productivity drop by onsite work", so I'm in the camp of "do whatever feels right for your team".
I think it depends on the type of work, personality of workers and maybe other factors. For example, I used to work in a team where we were each doing separate part of the thing and it was not too beneficial to talk about work. Sure, we talked in the office, but mostly about movies, personal stories and stuff like that. I did a lot more work from home because the office environment was distractive and I get distracted easily. I can imagine that remote would be far less effective if I worked in a different department.
Following the OP's assertion, they could have been even more successful if they weren't remote. Neither of these assertions (a general case assertion) nor a cherry picked set of anecdotes, proves the ideas.
Everyone is arguing about the age-old questions around productivity and how to measure it, in software development. Google's tracked metrics fell (probably after a time of instability or increase) and so the organization is reacting.
As you say remote is nice for the worker, and i am certainly not less productive, but for "let's concentrate on this task today to get it out" i tend to drive to the office. And it is also nice to have chats and friendly banter with others that might be in on the same day. Ofc most devs seem to be the strightly professional and introverted type.
Remote you definitely get less of the gossip that might help you, either for advancement, or by planning to steer things / intervene.
Would be super effective to live on premise, and not have a partner/kids (huuuuge loss of time), to have nutrition handled by intravenous feeding tubes, diapers so that you don't have to go to the bathroom anymore, we could work until 80 too after all!
Sooooooo many things to improve, we gotta please the capital overlords, god forbid we enjoy the progress we made so far to, you know, live life
> yeah I can tell that remote is far less effective.
In my experience, remote work is only more effective for "heads down" type coding work where you need long uninterrupted blocks of focus time. Modern offices tend to have lots of distractions.
For work that requires synchronous collaboration or conversations, remote work is less effective. It requires you to explicitly set up meetings to chat, which is much higher friction than just walking over to someone's desk.
Remote work is also much worse for building cross team relationships. In an office, you can easily bump into people across the company and at various levels. You learn a ton from these people, and sometimes these connections can be valuable for your career or even personal life. I've made several friends once I started going into the office frequently.
> But as a manager, I see that it's just so far less effective
With respect, this is a skill issue. I also manage people and satisfaction among those I manage is high (there is no change) and everyone else is just as happy with our output as they've always been. Of course there is plenty of complaining by other extroverted managers that they'd like to "see their colleagues more", but should that come at the cost of 2h per day for every single person? Absolutely no. If this is not clearly communicated they will abuse (IMO) their managerial powers by mandating folks do something to serve them. This is entirely the wrong attitude to take.
No offense intended but if remote is less effective that's management's fault. Remote is a completely different way of working. If you don't adapt to it, yes it'll suck. But there is nothing you lack when remote. Even in-office, if anyone is not within 20 feet of you, they're basically remote. Ya gotta adapt and learn new ways of working, and then remote is more productive, not less.
>how much more we can do it we meet together once in a while
The operative phrase here is "once in awhile". I agree that there is a need for teams to be in-person at times. But somehow that translated to everyone being in the office 3X a week last year and now that's turning into a push for 5X a week at many companies.
In my experience the “productivity” many teams achieve on their “all in office days” usually amounts to a whiteboard of good intentions (and yes, whiteboard sessions are 100 times better in person), which indeed energizes your average PO/PM/manager.
Could it be that it just makes manager's jobs easier?
The coordination part can be much easier in person, but the actual work part can be much worse, and what you as manager care about, and get rewarded for, is just the coordination part.
I see a huge shift in narrative even in comments around the Internet about return to office. Just saying.
I am a manager and manage a team of six people. One of them is in a completely different country. I trust all people in my team to do their job properly and am available to them all the time if needed. It works. Our team is profitable and we do a good job. Client and employee retention is high.
Managers requiring return to office and 'butts in seats' have their own issues. Nothing to do with work, communication, performance. That applies to jobs that can actually be done remotely of course.
Funny how the same people that are against remote work have no issue with remote customers. I doubt google would be happy with customers showing up at their offices to make payments or check emails. They expect customers to trust them. But google wont trust their very own employees to work remotely.
In my view its time to out these dinosaurs out of their misery and move on to companies equipped for modern day and age work habits.
Not sure that makes the point you want. The experience of being a remote customer of Google is pretty awful. You can't talk to anyone, things go wrong and there is nothing you can do about it.
They prefer remote customers because they want this dysfunction.
You mention that your team is profitable and your client retention is high: this suggests a very particular type of business.
Could it be that the nature of your work is well suited to remote work? Perhaps you’re delivering fairly well-known outputs or have really mature processes around getting work done?
It would be interesting to ponder some of the worlds greatest creations and timelines they were created on, if folks had all been remote. Could the transistor have been created if your physicist and mathematician were both sitting at a slack screen?
Probably not, but also modern day plumbers can’t really WFH either. I didn’t notice any implication that _every_ role can be done from home successfully, but many software engineering roles definitely can.
Plumbers have a 100% location-dependent job role by its very nature.
Inventing the transistor* or the next leap in LLMs are both knowledge work, so could both be performed remotely
*of course, there was a ton of actual science experimentation and lab work that needed physical presence, but my understanding of the key interactions between team members is that the key collaboration didn’t require physical presence
I know this one! Yes. One of my good friends is a senior electrical engineer who designs components for cern and during covid (and still) they told everyone to take all their equipment home and so his second bedroom is a a
full on lab. They've never stopped launching new products.
The opposite argument. Could AI advancements have accelerated if your ML engineers had to live in a crumbling city spending 25% of their work hours commuting and preparing to commute?
I really hope Google and other remote-hostile companies lose their prestige as some kind of stamp of excellence that's supposed to signal you're some higher caliber engineer. I never applied to work there because of their absurd interview process (along with other FAANGs) which require candidates to spend months on "interview prep" grinding Leetcode questions - a colossal waste of everyone's time. Even during COVID when all companies were remote I didn't apply because most big corporations tend to require employees to be trapped in their country unless you go through the hassle of transferring offices, and I prefer the freedom to live wherever I want.
This banning of remote work is so backwards, and will only contribute to their demise from their former peak. Next thing you know Google will no longer be seen as a "cool" place to work, and face the same fate as many former behemoths like IBM and Yahoo.
At this point I wonder who even desires to work at companies like Google except for entry level hires, prestige whores, and old people with families wanting stability.
Honestly I think Google has already lost its prestige. But it's not just RTO that's doing it, it's the politically toxic way they did their round of layoffs. RTO is not going to save them, they lost their mojo years ago, and they're now in a spiral towards being an IBM-style "legacy" company and the layoffs (which were just about playing to the stock market) just cemented that. That's the general consensus I see both from Xooglers and Googlers I talk to.
But also in addition to demanding RTO, their actual office situation sucks now. In the years before I quit Google (after 10 years of being there) they just made the actual office experience worse and worse. Cramming people in like sardines. Open concept noisy auditorium workspaces. Messing up the parking situation and requiring people to park and walk 10 minutes away while they ripped up the parking lot to build new castles to cram people into. Overhiring and overstaffing into dubious projects. Lowering quality of food and other perks. And during WFH if you actually wanted to come in there was a whole song and dance about reserving desks, and not getting any kind of permanent comfortable workstation.
I don't like working remotely. But I also despised the commuting situation; I was willing to tolerate it while the office was a pleasant environment. COVID ruined that.
Google started on the path to not being a "cool" company to work at when Ruth Porat came on as CFO. She did great things for the stock price, but long term bad things for the culture of the company.
Say what you will but Google is still a great place to work in my opinion. Work life balance is great, coworkers are solid, mentorship is abundant, culture is still great (subjective, but still true when I compare my experience to friends who work at other companies), there is continual investment in tooling and developer productivity, etc. I'm not just shilling because I work there and want to justify it to myself. I regularly investigate alternatives and cannot justify leaving when I'm happy.
I currently work at Google (though my time will be ending soon due to this shit show) and everything you said couldn’t be farther from the truth at least for me. I want to make sure everyone has both sides here instead of the rosey picture that so many want to paint.
Google is, by far, the worst place I’ve ever worked with the most useless work and uninspiring management and coworkers. I haven’t learned a damn thing in my time there. FB had its problems but I was at least learning there.
To me not being able to be fully remote is a complete non-starter for any job. I've been remote for the last 5 years, no way in hell I'd give up that freedom to be chained to an office again.
Also I'm not interested in wasting my time studying competitive programming questions for those interviews.
But sure if you love grinding Leetcode and don't mind being chained to a desk, I'm sure Google is alright.
Google has already lost its prestige. It’s a code factory, that’s why it demands butts in the seats and formalised interview questions - to ensure homogeneity and obedience. Avoid them like the plague, both as a customer and as an employee. Same goes for amazon and anyone else demanding employees return to office.
It certainly is a big test. Seems the most aggressive RTO companies are traditionally the best performing - Meta Google Goldmans, JPMorgan. Its going to be fascinating in 10 years looking back to find out who was right.
Meta and Google have insane cash cows and they are outliers no matter where their workers work. Other huge companies like Walmart and Amazon have huge workforces that have to work somewhere. I’d like to see breakdowns by industries: healthcare, retail, tech, or oil.
It’s going to be hard to tell what’s related to the Covid shutdown and what’s related to remote working.
Also just the shift in the economy generally. We've entered a new era in the longer term economic cycle. Many of the "rules" that applied from 2008-2022 no longer apply:
Annual two digit increases in ad impressions and clickthroughs and CPMs etc are not necessarily going to happen for Google.
Access to cheap Chinese hardware manufacturing may diminish as more things near-shore, supply chains continue to be messed with by wars (trade and physical) and economic disruption generally.
Tech employee preferences are shifting in terms of what they are willing or able to work on, and where they want to work.
VCs have cut back a huge amount in general, but their emphasis is also shifting.
So, yes, it will be really hard looking back to see what's WFH/RTO related and what's just a result of a rather massive restructuring generally.
2 days a week in an office is useless. Either make it 5 days a week in the office with up to x weeks of remote or make it full time remote. When an office requires 2 days a week in an office, you get none of the alleged benefits of in person work as everyone chooses which days they want. In a part time remote situation, the office ends up being 60% empty all the time anyways, and it's almost always a waste of time to hold a meeting in an office if even one of the attendees is remote, which is extremely common in modern software teams.
We have a coworking space and out dedicated rooms are shared between other teams and areas of the company. One day we might have all of the devs in, another day it might be all sales, etc.
Yes. But it would be half empty all days or empty some days. So you either rotate teams between days (but everyone will want the mid week days most likely). Or you accept a half empty office. Or you downscale the office. It's really that simple. I mean there are tons of reasons to be in the office. Doing remote or not depends on whether those benefits outweigh the drawbacks. But obviously "keeping the office full" isn't really one of the benefits.
Because there are advantages and disadvantages to remote and in person work. But one of the biggest advantages to remote work is being able to source from a talent pool that is 50x. By having 1 day a week of in-person you are giving up the single biggest advantage to remote work.
The reality of meetings is that they're all a waste of time. I'm starting to think the same about Teams meetings.
Video chat (for screensharing) with colleagues? Wonderfully effective. 64 people in the one Teams meeting? 100% seems to be "manager who can't bring himself to write a more then a 1 paragraph email and instead thinks too highly of his oratory skills".
Which has led me to my grand hypothesis that if you're calling a meeting just to give a fixed speech, write it out first and then decide why it's not an email...or decide just not to send it at all. If you think you need a meeting, then prepare the topics for discussion ahead of time and solicit an initial round of feedback.
We have 1 day where everyone related to the project is present, which is nice. The other day is useful for the junior we hired recently so we can support him better, but otherwise a waste.
My commute is 3 hours both ways. Bearable 1-2 days, but not 5. 1 day is enough to have most periodic meetings in person if everyone on the team comes the same day. To make office less empty different teams can come on different days so much smaller office can be used. The problem is many companies bound by long term contracts so a large office is a sunk cost.
I have a team split between 5 cities and timezones using modern software development work practices. I offered to comply with my employer's 2 day in-office mandate, but made it clear that on in-office days I wasn't going to work extra hours to support my teammates who were offshore. I was given an exemption.
My company ('systemically important' bank, ~100k enployees) is trying furiously to get us into the office 2 days a week. For many people this is more than was required of them pre-COVID.
What is actually happening is that people come in 1 day but there is nowhere to sit appropriate for development or any kind of 'engineering' work unless they are on site before 8am (no good for those of us with school runs to do). If there's no desk we're being asked to sit at benches or refectory style tables with our tiny laptop screens. The actual result of this is a day of no work, and, being europe, it means a bunch of people filling in the accident book saying they have a neck injury at the end of each day. This is going to get worse as they pressure people to come in without adequate desk numbers. The unions are swamped with complaints (yay for unions!).
If people can find a desk they are surrounded by project manangers or non-technical staff from other teams who are on calls all day with people who are remote, and they themselves are on calls with people who are remote, at home or in another EU country, India/US/etc. No synergy, no quick chats by the water cooler/kettle.
##Remote, virtual global teams do not benefit from being in the office.##
On a more personal note, I'm also finding it's a very noisy, distracting environment. For neurodivergent people (ADHD, Autism) the office is actually really challenging. I find I have to go and close myself in a meeting room to get some quiet at several points throught the day, and I leave early. It's exhausting.
I'd estimate that 80-90% of my team are neurodivergent engineers, cryptographers, or architects, and are actively seeking remote positions. I wholly support their efforts.
I am 100% sure this drive to get people in is because senior management are bored and lonely at home and don't want to come into empty offices. They've paid for these giant offices in London, NY and elsewhere, which cost a fortune, and need to see bums on seats. The way they stay up to speed on what's going on is chatting to people in the halls and corridors, so they don't even really need a computer! They live in a different world.
That's the opposite of what they just said (and, probably, of reality). My perception is that remote work is much more common in successful startups than it is in large companies.
I'm one of those weirdos who hates going in to the office. However, I'd like to provide a counter-point to that fact. My company has offices in Europe and I _love_ going to the office over there. Hate it in America. Love it in Europe. The question I ask myself is why? I don't feel isolated from my family. Its a couple blocks away. Safe and easy to get to. My son whose very young could safely walk there and back without being harmed (intentionally or accidentally). The city is so safe he could take the subway on his own if he wanted to. If I want to go home I can. If I want to go to lunch my family can meet me halfway.
The office in Europe _feels_ like an extension of home (in my experience - maybe not true for all). I feel a general sense of ease there. Taking the subway in New York or driving to work in Houston feels like a horrific burden that I'm just not willing to put up with anymore.
I work about 10 min away from the Chelsea Google office in NYC. It's just like you said. I usually start my day reading near my apartment and then going to the office. The subway is right under the building, so I can often get to where I'm going after work conveniently. The pharmacy and groceries are on the way home. When I'm not feeling well, I just go home to rest. Or if I'm need to go home and wait for a package. But lower Manhattan is one of the few pockets of "European-style" walkable areas in the country.
When I lived in Chelsea, Google contacted me and insisted I fly out to San Francisco for a curated tour of Mountain View
“Where leadership roles had to be”
I said I wanted to walk to work to the giant billion dollar office down the street, I love Chelsea, I love the Meatpacking District, I love the Highline and the things around that office, I love models
But “roles with direct reports had to be in mountain view” and they assured me I would be so impressed with the highly coveted Mountain View and highly coveted Google
the only thing seared in my brain from that trip was standing at an elevator that had a warning sign that I might get cancer if I use it, in the middle of a sprawling boring unwalkable suburb and a janitor being my best source at the time that its a boilerplate disclaimer. He was right. But that was my experience.
The Bay Area is a car sewer that could be teleported to the middle of Florida or North Dakota, and it would fit right in. It's a place you go for a couple years to make a bunch of money and have zero life, and you get out as soon as you possibly can. No culture. Just asphalt, office parks, pollution, run-down houses, and tent cities.
I live in a town of 80,000 now, that feels more urban than San Jose. It's crazy. San Jose is not a real place. It's a million people all dispersed in a couple hundred square miles, seemingly at random, all in their little boxes on the side of a highway. No landmarks, no tall buildings, no walkable areas. It's not the middle of nowhere, it is nowhere. I'd say you could not design a "city" more poorly if you tried, but the rest of Silicon Valley sure proves me wrong there! Mountain View is even worse somehow!
I'd say that they'd have better luck selling New Yorkers on their dystopian suburban hellscape if they weren't so obnoxiously positive about having paved paradise and put up a parking lot, but toxic positivity is kinda California's whole thing. They're not capable of putting themselves into our cynical headspace. You have to buy into all that woo-woo crap to survive out there. We're fundamentally incompatible with it. Won't find anywhere livable west of Chicago until you reach Tokyo...
It's fun to observe the difference in framing and word choice here. NY "cynicism" vs CA "toxic positivity".
As a Bay native, a younger version of me would've produced the mirror image to that rant along the lines of: "why are New Yorkers so angry and aggressive about everything? are they just miserable because they're all packed like sardines into that shabby concrete prison? why can't they just be chill like Californians?"
The first time you read an email that starts off with “hello friends” and continues on to talk about how “we made the tough decision to part with our valuable colleagues” you will understand what’s so grating about California nice. This kind of thing has unfortunately spread across the country, but California is the epicenter.
As somebody who’s lived half their life in each, both are exaggerations.
Most New Yorkers aren’t cynical. Most Bay Area folks aren’t toxically positive. But it’s silly to imagine that the urban infrastructure doesn’t influence peoples’ psyches - they totally do!
There’s nothing wrong with San Jose, it’s not amazing but it’s definitely not nowhere. Look at Japantown, a central neighborhood with nice well maintained apartments and condo developments well integrated in the street grid. Five minutes walk to dozens of shops and restaurants. Good network of bike routes including protected bike lanes on stroads. 12 minute bike ride to BART, 15 minute bike ride to CalTrain. 20 minute walk to downtown (adequate nightlife, San Pedro Square is walkable, etc). 20 minute bike ride to The Alameda and Willow Glen gives variety of walkable business districts. Plenty of parks with tall trees within a 20 bike ride (eg. Guadalupe River, Overfelt Gardens). Excellent Asian food, pretty good food in general. Fairly frequent city buses and a light rail (candidly, though, I have never used them).
That’s all^ for if you don’t have a car. Yea with a car you can access all the suburban stuff of which there is a lot (eg. shopping and restaurants at Westfield, The Pruneyard, eg. amazing hiking at New Almaden, Saratoga Quarry Park, eg. the vast amenities of nearby small cities). I recommend a car, it gives you access to more stuff, but is definitely not necessary, and even if you have one you don’t need to drive for everyday needs.
My one complaint about San Jose is not enough of a base of everyday cultural events, specifically live music and stand up comedy. The only small music venue I am familiar with that has regular bands is Mama Kin’s. There is no good regular stand up comedy to my knowledge. I guess SF and Oakland suck that energy out of SJ, but that’s a real deficiency.
No landmarks, no tall buildings, no walkable areas.
Absolutely not true - and shame on you if you've never explored the older neighborhoods downtown.
However I definitely agree that overall it's a huge did of a city for its size (and most especially for the housing costs). And that you're saying applies to at least 90 percent of it by surface area. "Not a real place" absolutely nails it.
Won't find anywhere livable west of Chicago until you reach Tokyo...
Not true at all. Sounds like you've almost never been out there, except for a random business trip or two. The west coast isn't my ideal either, but it has plenty of perfectly livable places (if you can only somehow afford to settle down there).
I visited San Fransisco in the late 90s, it was a fantastic place, one of the best cities I went to in th US. What happened? What caused it to get so bad?
San Francisco ia a sideshow. America is a suburban country and the Bay Area is a suburban place. There are ten times as many people in the metro area as in the city. Only Salesforce and Uber are in the city; the rest of Big Tech is in the suburbs. The social and physical infrastructure is built for someone who has a family and works in an office to live in the suburbs.
American postwar suburbia has a well-oiled machine for metabolizing growth, but it has to be fed with virgin land. The Bay Area long ago ran out. The growth kept on going, so it manifests in house prices and dysfunction instead.
The problem was the centralization of a certain brand of tech. If they had started making semiconductors in 1 or 2 other places in America this wouldn't have happened.
He's talking about "Silicon Valley" which is an hours drive south of San Francisco. As for San Francisco itself, I still love it here. Downtown has been dead since the pandemic but I don't really go there so it doesnt affect me much. And outsiders seem to have ramped up their anti-SF propaganda quite a bit but that doesnt affect me much either.
You can have fun on a weekend and it has unique look
I hate it though
People there act like or want to be categorized in the same tier as NY, London, Hong Kong and has nothing to cater to that tier except for the people that already wanted to check out to anytown USA with a high achieving leaning, but it doesnt have the self awareness to realize that
I'm writing from San Jose right now. I a few minutes away from downtown on my electric bike. It's a city like many others. I've lived in Orlando, San Diego, Seattle, Norfolk, Providence.
I'm guessing you worked long hours in an office park and shuttled between a generic apartment and your generic office park. That's dystopian, I agree, but it's not enough experience of a city to judge it and you could have that experience in many other cities.
I'm not really defending San Jose, I'm just saying it's no worse than most other cities. It lacks a waterfront. Cities with water fronts usually seem better.
As a San Jose resident, let me tell you, San Jose is just really big boring suburban town. It's not a city, no matter what the sign or the population is. There's no downtown. Like sure, there's a place called "downtown", but it's empty, even when SJSU is in session, and when it's not, it's even more of a ghost town. It's not even a good university district. Sure downtown Willow Glen is okay, but it's no different from Castro Street in Mountain View or University Ave in Palo Alto.
Most of San Jose is just tract homes, office parks, strip malls, and parking lots.
The worst part of San Jose is that there's absolutely zero culture here. Like none. Anything interesting in the Bay Area, it's in SF.
I totally agree, San Jose is not as interesting as San Francisco. That's why I take the train to SF. San Jose is a boring city, but my point is many other cities are the same. If I were a young person I wouldn't want to live here. I lived in Portland for awhile and that has a lot more character, but the weather is a huge drawback for me. I like the nice weather in San Jose, pretty much year round. Seattle is ok, but again the weather. I don't think San Jose is any worse than Salt Lake City. If I had the ability to live in any city, I'd move to Nashville.
Edit: I'm basing my opinion on a lot of time spent wandering around by car to have a look around North America. Over 100,000 miles. Some cities that have a good rep actually suck in my opinion, like Austin TX. Actually the most interesting city in N. America appeared to be Vancouver Canada, but I'm not a citizen so I couldn't live there.
I wouldn’t say it’s the same as any major city. Major cities typically have an entertainment district and a vibe. San Jose doesn’t have that. It’s lack of a real entertainment district and general lack of walkability is a recurring problem at city council meetings.
The summer weather in central Texas is not to my liking. When I was there it was very hot, very muggy and dusty. It's better than San Antonio, but if I lived in Texas it be down by Corpus Christi. Rockport was really nice. I once thought about retiring to the Gulf Coast. Fort Walton Beach Florida with it's white sand beaches was a real find for me because it was cheap to live too.
A big part of that “downtown” everyone tries to hype up is a tent city these days, so…
I’m not sure how that makes you feel better spending all that money to live in a place that makes Cleveland look downright exciting in comparison. At least SF and Oakland have some more excitement to go with the unbelievable cost of living and quality of life issues.
If it has more parking space than restaurant/bar terrasses and pedestrian only streets, this is not a city. This is just drawing streets in square and putting building and parking between them.
Providence and Seattle are far better examples of urbanism. I’d agree that it isn’t worse than Orlando. That’s not exactly high praise. Why spend NYC money to live somewhere that’s no better than Orlando?
Hey now, Howard St in San Fransisco is a pretty great camp ground. Everything you need, with REI right around the corner you can try every tent with their infinite return policy, or just take the tent out the front door and not bother with a receipt. No permits necessary. Cant really think of anything similar in competitiveness.
It’s great if you move there with $1M in your pocket for a down payment. I think a somewhat boring city, but the access to nature is unparalleled (well, at least comparable to Denver or SLC).
I have zero interest in putting where I’m at anymore on the map than it already is. Such places are vanishingly rare in the US, and incredibly common in Europe. It’s very frustrating.
However, in the interest of shaking everyone off my trail, I will mention that there’s many affordable, walkable towns and cities outside Philly and Chicago that were built up 100 years along the commuter railroads. In the absence of zoning-related tyranny, transit oriented development happens naturally. Look for towns and cities that were built before 1945, before we paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
The most likely explanation for this is that your recruiter (either individually, or recruiting in general) was tasked with filling roles for an org in MTV.
From the outside looking in, recruiting presents as a unified front, but in reality at many big corps recruiters will not be handling generic hiring. And they may either not be incentivized, or so new and unable to navigate the chaos, such that they can’t direct you to open roles outside their jurisdiction.
Yeah, i applied at the MV office a few years back and it was just hell on earth. Huge office park of nameless buildings and their big perk was a free lunch at a picnic table in a warehouse with 2000 computer programmers. I really don't get the appeal.
It's even worse now, they crammed down more desks and got rid of many things that made the office nice. With the return to office we got greeted with a "remodeled" campus, but cool spaces are just now cookie-cutter meeting rooms or really oddly placed new desks.
Yea uh, don't know what was going on there but there are roles with direct reports that aren't in mountain view (unless you mean, like in 2004). NYC has 1000s of googlers.
when recruiters unilaterally reach out to you it’s about a specific team and specific role, even if that’s just bait or a hook for other roles. very different than scouring a careers site for all positions. just writing that in case you weren’t familiar with that.
Also during my time there, yes there were roles with direct reports outside, but if you kept your eyes open you quickly saw that there was effectively a glass ceiling outside of MTV, NYC (and for some groups, LON or ZRH).
People would consistently get promoted more easily for less impactful projects, and getting headcount and approvals for projects in satellite offices was damn near impossible.
If you wanted to get ahead - To L7 or L8, even L6 on some projects - you had to relocate.
Ah prop 65 warnings. They are literally everywhere in California. I wish I could say it's the most stupid thing in California, but unfortunately there are many more. California's voters like it that way.
I'd presume they have already been at Google before, but Google wanted them to not be at the Chelsea office in NYC (the walkable one) but instead in Mountain View. So this is more an existing disagreement with the employer.
the first part made some sense, but the second part with the prop65 warning is pretty silly. it's everywhere, and kind of useless for the most part, but i've seen it on buildings, in parking garages at disney, on clothing, on equipment i've purchased. it's just a thing (tm).
and i'm moving to MV at the end of the month and am super excited about the walkability, green space, beautiful area, weather, and proximity to work.
sure, it's kind-of boring suburb, it isn't europe, but i thought it was quite nice.
. . . but the second part with the prop65 warning is pretty silly.
As someone from outside California, who lived there for a while, I have to say that it is pretty jarring the first time you see it. Now, it doesn't take long to get used to it and realise what a joke it is, but that first impression sticks.
Not that there's any excuse but I can imagine this was a recruiter who had to fill a bay area position. There are plenty of higher ups in the NYC Google office.
“Prop 65 warnings” are a California-ism where they got the people to vote on a good idea(tm) of having a carcinogen database, and then soon after that, a lawyer saw he could sue everyone and win and did, so to prevent that everyone puts unconfirmed carcinogen disclaimers on everything to the point that it is useless.
Fast forward to me being flown out to California and having to make a judgement call at the cancer elevator.
The "good idea" part was maybe the database. The "horrible idea" part was mandating notifications without defining any lower limits or exposure measures, and allowing anybody to sue for the absence of warnings. It was not just "discovered" by some lawyer, it's how the law was written. And Californians had ample time to fix it since, btw, but never bothered.
Steel Products
Steel products can expose you to nickel, known to the State of California to cause cancer, and lead, known to the State of California to cause both cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm.
Power Tool Parts
WARNING: The metal parts of these products contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling. None of these products are to come in contact with food and drinking water.
Electrical Cords
WARNING: The wires of these products contain chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm. Wash hands after handling.
Yes. Why wouldn’t I? When I first started working from home after Covid, I had a separate bedroom that was converted to an office and across the hall I had a home gym fully equipped with cardio equipment. I had no distractions from a loud open office and I could block time off for deep work and shut everything down - Slack, Outlook etc.
I said “had” because admittedly now I’m a corner case. My wife and I nomad around the US 7 months a year staying in mostly extended stay hotels and the other 5 months (October-March) we “snowbird” in our home in Florida that’s rented out when we aren’t there to cover the mortgage.
Before covid, my coworkers would get half the office sick, including me, about 4 or 5 times a year. Back then it was just taken for granted that getting sick was a part of life. Well I haven't been sick in 3 and a half years since working from home, and masking, hand sanitizing, etc. Covid changed me, and I don't regret any of it.
I've lived the excesses of over-funded startups - I don't need the catered breakfasts and lunches, I don't need the endless snacks and drinks, I don't need the fancy desk chairs or fancy desks - I need to not get deathly ill several times a year.
That's the absolute #1 top reason why I won't go back to an office. It's not just about covid - it's about all viruses and illnesses that coworkers spread around the office. Heck no I don't want any of that in my life anymore. No thank you.
This is a point employers often overlook: working with other people means exchanging bacteria, viruses etc.
The more people there are and the higher the turnaround, the higher the likelihood of disease. Covid has finally shed a light on this.
A friend of mine gives tours at a museum of modern art; he says what you say: it's almost a part of the job to get sick at least once per year, typically in flu season in winter.
Employers should be forces to either guarantee there only a very small and stable team of people you meet on a daily basis -- or pay employees premium for the risk they incur because of diseases.
The alternative is to live like people live in Japan where everyone wears a mask all the time during flu season. But people in the west are often too lazy and "individual" for that. I don't really like to be overly broad and generalize, but the COVID stats prove it clearly:
https://pandem-ic.com/japan-and-us-are-worlds-apart-on-pande...
This attitude is more dystopia than any micromanaging over the shoulder boss.
"Companies should pay an employees a stipend for the risk of..... human contact!"
I already lament the world where parents are fined and sometimes jailed for letting their kids exist independent of surveillance, and we do not need to take further steps into isolation and atomization
Indeed, besides the obvious social damage it does (you're basically chopping people up to be fodder to amoral adtech industries) there's something to be said for the hygiene hypothesis and its continuation throughout life.
Casual and constant exposure to infectious agents (natural ones, not those transmitted over TCP/IP) develops and maintains an immune response. It's not just the brain wired to have interactions with others, it's the whole gestalt.
Most people at my office seem to get sick from their kids who in turn get it from daycare. Should employees pay for that as well? I guess the alternative is to just never employ parents.
It almost always comes from either the employees that have to travel a lot for their jobs OR people with kids... because of course kids, younger more so, trade the illnesses around and also help them mutate and spread more.
> Before covid, my coworkers would get half the office sick, including me, about 4 or 5 times a year. Back then it was just taken for granted that getting sick was a part of life.
Any thoughts on how this happened? Did not have this experience in a diverse 40-year job history
Young workforce does not have these luxuries. Most of time they would be sharing home or would have tiny apartment, they may not even have people around them through the day (having people around is a good thing - isolation, loneliness is leading to depressions).
This even without accounting for career related advantages when physically being in the office - building professional network, serendipitous discovery of undocumented information.
In any large company, the workforce is so scattered anyway that you still end up having to do remote networking. I’ve been working remotely since 6/2020 at $BigTech and my network has grown much more now than it did in the 25 years I spent working in an office.
Nope. Love my home, we set our entire life to be remote. See my child every minute (except for school) and see my wife every minute.
I would need to be forced to the office, never going there.
Happy to go on an occasional trip though, love my colleagues, but family first
Hypothesis: so many adults have mental issues such as depression because they grew up with parents going to the office a lot of the time (for no good real reason other than "manager wants me to").
Most kids grow up without their parents really being there for them all the time. I feel this must be especially harmful the younger the kids are.
I personally find it completely inhumane and the whole going to the office thing makes 0 sense to me. I mean it makes sense that managers want to physically feel in charge of their herd, but that's obviously not a good reason from my perspective.
I think it's more likely to be the opposite: we're creating more mental issues by being more isolated from everyone outside our immediate family. "Stranger danger," watching screens or talking on the internet instead of hanging out in person with other kids/teens, etc. Generations that don't know how to meet people or talk to people outside of pre-arranged circumstance/activities or explicitly-circumscribed situations like "if you connect on Tinder, it's for dating or sex."
The mental issues you describe hit everyone, even that vast majority of people who go in to work every day. I would more readily ascribe them to the declining amount of healthy “third places” (i.e. neither work nor home) in modern US society, not remote jobs.
The comment I was replying to put the blame for mental health on "parents having jobs outside of the home during childhood." I think there are far more impactful socialization changes to the childhood experience in the last fifty years than just that; I'm not suggesting that a three year spike in remote work has caused immediate widespread harm.
I would even argue that working from home would increase the likelihood of going out and socializing after work. As you might want to get out of the house after for a bit and you have been spending time with family throughout the day. Where working at the office means you only have evenings to spend with family.
I don't want to go to an office, but I still am very social & go out all the time. This is the case for most people I know. In fact, if I didn't have to commute for 2 hours a day I'd have more time for social activities.
I'd also love to have some extra time to be able to go to the gym, but right now I'm getting home, cooking, eating, and suddenly it's past 9pm and I'm having to think about getting stuff ready for work the next day.
I disagree, it's way easier to meet people now that I don't loose 1.5h every day. I also eat better and have more energy, so I can go to the climbing gym/the sea every day, which I couldn't when I was in a office.
I talk to my neighbors every day. Working from home let's me feel connected to the community I actually live in, it's awesome. I actually find I really like socializing with people outside of our industry. It's a breath of fresh air.
I’m in agreement. Summers are challenging to have the kids (7 and 10) around, but it’s a challenge worth having. They are young once and I’d like to be there for them. even if the office is five miles away, I’m more productive as a programmer and a dad. Seems like a win/win.
This summer over the course of 9 weeks, my daughters will spend 5 weeks abroads. 3 weeks at my parents place in one country, 2 weeks at their other grandfather house in another country. The 2 remaining weeks we will have family visit and can spare taking a few days between me and their mother.
With a bit of organization it is not that challenging to have kids. Also there are a number of possible summer activities with school like schedules for those who have less family around + possibility to hire a student to take care of kids while you are working during summer.
We were thinking of shipping our kid off to grandmas when he gets older. The fact that grandma lives in small town China and my kid has mostly forgotten how to speak Chinese would make that an adventure at least.
I was surprised how quickly summer activities filled up this year. We got him in a Boys and Girl camp at least, but demand is super high for what's available in our region.
Totally agree. Working from the office is a dealbreaker for me yet I prefer working in an office compared to home. I just hate wasting a portion of my day to commuting or turning a 8 hour work day into a 10 hour workday for the same pay.
In my experience it seems like the people who make the decisions on returning to the office are those who can afford to live close to the office.
Facebook used to do basically that - they gave you a $1000/month stipend if you lived within 5 miles of the office. A lot of other companies do it in more informal ways too, eg. I've heard of companies turning down applicants because they lived an hour and a half commute away from the office.
It has some mixed results. It's very positive for traffic and for climate change - if everyone goes from a 30 mile commute to a 5 mile one, that's 6x fewer vehicle miles traveled, 6x less car CO2 emissions, and 6x less traffic. But it also drives up rents around the office to crazy-high levels. Facebook's policy basically just boosted rents in Palo Alto by $1000/month (when they were there), and then it and the office location was single-handedly responsible for the gentrification of East Palo Alto (after they moved).
If I were to commute to my companies nearest office it’s about 1h20 or 60 miles.
Let’s assume I moved to near that office and lived in a high density area away from nature and dark skies. What does my wife do, who now faces an 80 mile commute the other way?
That's just what it boils down to: Add kids to the mix and you'll have them change schools (and their entire social circle) every time you do a career change - to earn more, to do something more interesting, or because you're simply forced to.
For anyone but singles, co-located work seems anachronistic. Worked back in the day were only one person in the family had a job, and jobs were held for decades (not years) I suppose. Today it seems ludicrous to expect anyone to move for work.
Which naturally leads into either long commutes or remote work. Having built several remote-first companies, I'm gonna say it's not perfect, but it really works.
This makes sense multiple perspectives: it's good for the climate to not make people burn gasoline every day (though this point may be lost on some people) and it's also good for the local community - both the employer needs to step his game up to assist and train people more since talent pool is limited and locals also need to step their game up since there are only so many local employers around (assuming all prefer to hire locally).
Going this way, if this were a law, would also prevent employers from treating people as expendable.
Flying people in from across the globe because they are marginally cheaper than the local work force never made sense to me.
Is that so bad? The other way of looking at it is that employers would be more likely to allow WFH, since they don't have to pay for your commute costs anymore
TBH I'm on salary like many here and I do subtract the commute time (1.5 hr round trip) from work hours when I go in. I'm not paid by the hour so I'm not commuting then doing a full 8 hours in the office, sorry.
I’m on salary and wfh but often work 4 hours/day. Of course some times if it’s “crunch time” I work 12 hours. But on average it’s probably under 6. The whole point of salary is you don’t count hours though so you are encourage to be efficient instead of inefficient
Work want to move me off an hourly wage. Which is fine, but it means instead of being paid time and a half for every hour over 35, I take 1.5h in lieu off.
If I do a 90 hour week you’ll barely see me for the next three weeks.
Here in Japan, employers have to pay for the employee's public transit commuting costs (but not time). So people living very far away (i.e. outside the city's transit service area) are unlikely to get an offer.
It’s not just commute, I’d like an office but not my current employers office so I work from home. I would love to go into a decent office, except they cheaped out so much on the work equipment.
The beige and drab decor is okay, it’s the way the monitors are so cheap and outdated. And the way the mouse and keyboard are the cheapest possible. Giving people doing knowledge work on computers all day the cheapest possible interface just don’t make sense. It’s penny wise pound foolish.
And The office neighborhood is also very unfriendly for pedestrians and bikers. it’s clear planners believed there was zero chance of people actually walking anywhere.
I’d much prefer an office with decent equipment and a better setting. it’s a reason why I am considering switching jobs. To have a decent office to go to.
Agreed on this. It is partly the commute, but also the environment you end up in. I used to work for a FAANG in “cube-ville USA”. It was dark and demoralizing. There were great views out of the windows, but you couldn’t see them through your cubicle walls. A bunch of us took the top panels down so we could enjoy the sunlight and view, but quickly got in trouble with facilities. It was fairly miserable. Until they moved us to a team room with zero windows. That was worse. I left soon after.
I worked at Google for 10 years and I always tried to make myself a cubicle by getting a corner desk and then getting soundproof barriers. Cubicles got a bad rap but open plan offices are way worse.
I live in a relatively small city of Spain, working for a considerably big consulting company. It takes 30 minutes to walk to the office from my home, and I'm on remote 1-2 days a week.
This is a lovely balance. While the vast majority of my team is distributed across the country (and Europe, too), having the flexibility to stay at home or work alongside colleagues from other projects is great.
Need to focus on development one day? I'll stay at home, since it is more peaceful and my equipment is better (long live big screens with high refresh rates). Want to not worry about cooking and have lunch with other people? I'll go to the office.
I'm also quite active too. It can be a bit tedious, but walking at least 6km everyday does wonders for your health. Specially since I'm a type 1 diabetic.
Nevertheless, my contractor is far from perfect (I could rant for hours about how absolutely crap our company laptops are for developers). But it seems like these kinds of situations can only happen in small, compact cities; which is usually the case for Europeans and rarely for US cities.
I'd highly recommend hybrid to anyone who can afford it, but, as always, your mileage may vary
> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
Absolutely, yes. Don’t know how it’s in Google, but offices in our company don’t supply nice equipment like Herman Miller chairs with high quality desk and constant distractions from other people make any kind of deep state of work impossible.
Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden (if you’re one of those lucky people!) and the clear winner is obvious.
Open office layouts can be hard to deal with for me, even if everything else (chair, desk, computer, etc) are good. It varies from day to day but there are days where it's practically impossible to think due to coworkers buzzing around like bees, popping in and out of peripheral vision. When that happens, putting on ANC headphones is like trying to patch a basketball-sized hole in a boat with a piece of chewing gum.
Working from home there are still days when focusing is difficult, but nothing as frustrating as that.
Offices don't even supply offices anymore and haven't for decades. They're clearly not fit for purpose.
There's a reason why 10x engineers inevitably work evenings and weekends, and, if they have any social acumen, manage to get themselves excused from most workday time wasting rituals, including showing up at the office.
> Add on top of that having a house with a nice garden
Do you mean "garden" in the American sense (an area for growing food and/or decorative plants), or in the British sense (what American's would call a "lawn" or "yard")?
The Irish I talk to all call their private patch of green adjacent their house a 'garden' even if it contains only grass with optional tree. I had assumed they got the word from you guys.
I think the confusion here is from you presenting a "yard" as an alternative, when a yard in UK/Ireland would be a space that's mostly or entirely paved or has some other artifical surface
When my company still had WeWork passes, I would go to the WeWork just across from my gym sometimes, which I go to (the gym) every day around lunch anyway. 10 minute walk there downhill, maybe a 15 minute walk back uphill. It was pretty nice. The main downsides were the hot-desking and not having dedicated hardware there.
My home office is kitted out with an ultrawide monitor, a nice webcam lighting setup, a great mic with a nice low-profile arm that slides under the monitor, a powerful desktop tower, etc.
The downside to working in an office, even when there is dedicated hardware that stays there, is that the hardware is usually not gonna be as good as what I have at home, and that I will not be able to have my own office room to work from without distractions.
Criticism of open office plans was almost a trope (there's a software book from the 90s that rips into them), but in the years before Covid, companies doubled-down, removing partitions and implementing full hot-desking.
I think those horrible, noisy environments would have led to a backlash sooner rather than later. Now any complaints about open plan offices will just be dismissed as people whining about not being able to WFH.
In an open-plan office, you have to listen to all your coworkers, including those on completely different teams, have extremely loud and simultaneous conversations that you can hear from far across the room.
In a coffee shop, people generally don't talk, or keep their voices low when they do, so you generally only hear people talking to the staff to make orders and such.
Roles aren't always that well-defined. Many of us aren't recruiters or in sales but can still spend hours a day on planning, etc. calls with distributed teams. It's not practical to seek out a phone booth or alcove for every one of those calls.
There was a group of people in a meeting room working on separate parts of some larger project. I had to call one of them. You think that guy would get off his ass to walk away and talk to me in private? I spend the time helping you out and you don't even offer me that?
No, I had to hear 3 other people having a conversation louder than his call with me.
Last time I was at the coffee shop someone was watching Netflix at full volume. So yeah that was pretty bad. And I don’t have any power to stop them (at a workplace I could complain perhaps)
> For some, probably. I'm happy to work in a cafeteria, coffee shop, etc.
Depends on the work you do and your age, I suppose. Also whether you touch type on a standard keyboard or not.
My work is made easier with large dual monitors and a nice standard keyboard. Squinting into a single small screen while mispressing all the laptop keys (because those characters commonly used for programming don't have a consistent spot in any laptop keyboard) is not my idea of fun.
We're a social species. So, many people actually enjoy meeting with and mingling with their colleagues.
During Covid, a local co working space here in Berlin was one of the few places I could still go to. It's a five minute walk from my door and I did go there quite often. So, yes, I would and I have. And I don't even have a family to escape from. I've been working remotely in various settings for close to a decade. But I've done so from various offices for most of that time.
I've also been to the US on business travel a few times and got to spend some time in a few offices. There's a real difference between the US and Europe and it isn't good. The average US office with it's cubicles, air conditioning, lack of a view, and typical dreary locale is just miserable.
Google is of course famous for making an effort to make their offices nice. But from what I've seen it's still a cubicle hell. So, I can imagine that enduring a lengthy commute for the privilege of being miserable there is a bit of a hard sell. On the other hand, they do pay a premium for their people. So asking them to show up is maybe not that unreasonable. And of course they have to justify maintaining offices in a places with epic real estate pricing. If people stop showing up, you might legitimately wonder what the point of being in such expensive areas is to begin with.
Some people do have very specific demands of company office environments because they don't like working in more open settings with ambient noise.
For me, if I could walk 5-10 minutes to an office (especially with people I actually worked with, which wouldn't be the case if I drove 30 minutes to the nearest office) I'd probably do so pretty regularly. For me, it's definitely mostly about the commute which would be 30+ minutes to the closest office and then I wouldn't know anyone there.
Cubicles are bad for collaboration: you can't easily hear all the conversations around you that have absolutely nothing to do with whatever you're working on. Corporate executives know that being constantly exposed to conversations on topics outside your expertise is great for collaboration and productivity.
Sadly cubicles aren't very soundproof or private (but they are still better than open plan for people who need to concentrate or focus.)
University libraries tend to be somewhat open plan, though sometimes with study carrels, and students manage to get work done there. However they also typically quiet environments as well, there are no supervisors walking around, and falling asleep may be socially acceptable. The density might be better in some cases as well.
Cubicles obviously aren't soundproof of course, but they're normally made with cloth-covered walls that do a pretty good job of absorbing sound, so offices filled with cubicles tend to be fairly quiet, and conversations don't travel far.
I think it's a reference to acceptable behaviour in different cultures. Tokyo station in rush hour is surprisingly quiet even though it's a sea of bodies.
Maybe, but my open-plan office here in Tokyo is much, much noisier than the cubicle farms I used to work in back in the US (back when cubicle farms were the norm).
It's not culture, it's physics. With a room full of a maze of cloth panels (which are specifically designed to absorb sound), sound is absorbed and can't bounce around the room, leading to much lower overall ambient noise levels.
Not really for most people. When I interviewed with Boeing in the 80s, it was a room full of desks and no partitions with managers around the outside in offices. I did, at the time, have a job with another company where I had an office (though I spent most of my time on job sites) but offices for IC engineers were never the norm at most companies.
We have separate offices for different teams (for the most part). Some are just glass walls and no doors (open in one end). Some are not really offices but partly divided by cubicle dividers. I feel that works pretty good. The most important thing is to divide the office up a bit so it's not just a huge open floor with desks.
And then there's "quiet offices" you can use if you need to take a sensitive call or have a quick meeting with 2-3 people.
Couldn't agree more: I used to cycle 15 mins to the train station, then take the train for 20 mins, then walk for another 10. Then I changed jobs and my commute turned to being 25 mins on the motorway. Which was shorter and more comfortable, yet I kind of hated it; I was so happy when I moved and changed jobs again.
There is something about walking / cycling that makes even the most miserable day at least tolerable. Now my commute is a combined cycle + train journey again, but now I'm cycling through lovely countryside on quiet country roads. I cannot possibly convey how much I appreciate it, I used to be a city boy!
I'm supposing in this thought experiment, being so close means you could be in the office for morning standup, work breaks, and meetings, and still do your deep work at home each day...
Even if you’re not so close you can shift evening commute home to lunchtime or early afternoon, and settle in for solo time at home. I do this quite a bit.
My work is about an easy 15 minute bike ride through a forest on paved paths. Very nice. I hate it. I hate having to get ready. I hate the time going there and back. I hate everything about commuting, even for an easy commute like mine.
I'm the exact opposite, I love having a 5k bike ride as my commute. It helps clear my head and it keeps me healthy. During COVID I even rented my own office away from my home just to have an excuse for a daily ride.
You could've just gone for a morning and evening cycle. When I started working from home I went for a walk before and after, it initially helped me maintain the mental work/life balance.
that's crazy, because biking 10 min to work was my favourite part of going to work.i loved biking thru my city, and having the flexibility to leave when i want, get home fast, and take public transit if i wanted to.
tho tbf i don't work well from home, i need social interaction and less distraction. the bike ride was great to wake up, jam, or think about problems for the day
It's 90% the commute (and the time lost in commuting, especially if you need to set up your gear), and only 10% actually being in an office. I have been fully remote 10+ years now while everyone else was at the office in a city I moved from, so that's the worst of both worlds: people don't need to be social on Teams/Slack, they are social by the coffee machine. But I'm not at the coffee machine.
The pandemic was a huge improvement. Suddenly everyone was remote. So it's definitely improved. In a perfect world I'd be very happy to go to an office one or two days per week and have meetings, be social. If the commute was 5 minutes rather than an hour, then I'd be happy to do it 3-4 days a week. But I don't think I'd want it to be 5 days even if I could walk there in two minutes.
Would you rather be 5 minutes from your office or your kids’ school? Or 5 minutes from your office or 5 minutes from your extended family? Or 5 minutes from the beach? Or 5 minutes from the ski slopes?
There are a lot of locations that really benefit me being close to them than being close to the office.
Also, 5 minutes from the office is not very far. If a lot of people work at the office, living spaces 5 minutes from the office will either end up really expensive or really small.
I'm 5 minutes from the beach (walking), 5 from my gym (biking), max 10 from my friends (both) and 15 from my family (biking). Also have a school nearby. Now I just have to find an office, or create my own.
Both Google and Facebook were in the process of building little company towns, mixed-ish residential/office zones, is my understanding. Both on pause indefinitely.
On the one hand, I makes sense to pause. On the other hand, making vibrant light urban spaces feels like something they could pull off & really build on. Become a destination company.
Yes, the US healthcare profiteer-capitalism is fucked. But it's not employers fault.
I have no idea what the housing model proposed is. But everywhere else in the US that is mildly popular is ragingly expensive. If I can live in a great place affordably while making a solid paycheck for the future, that doesn't feel like a trap, that feels like a development course. Even if it doesn't last. The meanest thing we can say here is that the rest of the country can't compete, which again isn't the fault of those entities trying to make better.
Will there be a company store? I dunno. Is this a worthwhile dig or a trope, a regurgitation of past historic circumstance? We just spent a while talking about how companies will be desperate to lock employees in, golden handcuff them into never leaving... But now suddenly it's dark Zuckville & he's also nickel & dime scrooging over the employees? This no longer sounds like a viable Destination Company...
Will it be both too utopian and too dystopian all at once? Or is there one side of too much you'd wager for?
I absolutely think this could be shit & terrible. But this is a vacuous shitty useless historically-based drag that, but to me, fails any real analysis of the current situation, ignores the possibilities at hand, and just seeks to disabuse.
In those wonderful towns, residents not only get fired for wrongthink, they also get evicted by the corporate police. The omnipresent cctv cameras help residents stay in line with the community standards of inclusive speech and behavior.
Pripyat, in Soviet-Ukraine, a “nuclear town” was established and subsequently evacuated when the infamous meltdown occurred: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pripyat
In the US, specifically, a lot of company towns issued scrip instead of cash or allowed workers to charge to an account expenses they could not afford. This may be outlawed but I think this model can be sufficiently masked with technology that it can be implemented and even incentivized for workers to use company money. Further, the company town’s isolation will suggest workers stay inside. Now your whole social circle and standard of life is dictated by someone else’s bottom line.
>I'm just not aware of any examples if this actually happening
That's the point. Google by and large treats its employees really well. There's no reason to think it would push this dystopian version of employee housing, instead of something a lot more tame. The only explanation I can think of is that some people just like thinking of themselves as the little guy against the world.
It’s the consolation of power that is concerning. The idea that one single institution that is accountable to nobody but it’s shareholders can dictate where you live, eat, who your friends are, and where your family is.
Many very-bad, dictatorship-type regimes have come into power with immense public support - a public that thought they would continue to be treated well.
I don't know why you're going to such lengths to defend someone who claimed they would be arrested by the corporate cops for thought crime. Over Google building some employee housing close to their office.
On the other hand, the rest of the world being exploiting wolves of capitalism fucking over everyone, obstructing most everyone trying to get started & make their way seems to be the actual evil here.
I agree there's potentials for the company to grow mean & sour, to exploit the position of granter of a reasonably good life. Ideally a good life should also be available by other means. What really is damned in this condemnation is the rest of the world, which lacks in offerances & alternatives.
The idea is that this is a destination company. Your whole premise is that people get exploited. Maybe over time that's true, but you will never create a destination company by being a shitty fuck.
This is not a persecution complex. As long as you are employed by a company, you are engaging in a business transaction. Once they determine you are no longer worth the expense, they will cut the expense, then your are no longer welcome in Googleville.
I personally never mentioned thought crimes, rather my argument is based on the rather fleeting nature of even full time employment in todays age.
The corporation had no loyalty and has no obligation to you beyond what was agreed upon when you got hired. A termination for any reason means your entire life is uprooted. In addition to finding a new employer, you are now looking for housing. That idea of vulnerability is terrifying to a lot of people and will cause further asymmetry in the employee-employer relationship.
I would go every day if it was 5 min. Even if it was 15 min. But right now my commute is 1 hour+ unless I go off peak but that makes the scheduling awkward. Still I do that pretty often because I find the collaboration far superior in person. One day in person produces more good ideas than two months remote
I am a 5 min bicycle ride from my office yet I still WFH 3-4 days per week. And if a daily office presence would be required at some point I'd just switch job.
> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
I'd still want the office to be nice. If it's some concrete monstrosity where I can't get them to buy a decent chair and I have to sit in an open plan… home still wins.
Probably not, or at least not much. At home I have my own office, a window that looks out on trees and provides ample natural light, and my family. And I don't have to wear pants or shoes.
At the office I share an office with someone. It has no windows, so it's stuffy and lit only by harsh florescent lights. We have to take turns using the office because we just sit on video calls all day. I basically just sit in this torture box on video calls all day.
If it were five minutes walk, I would consider walking over there after dropping the kids off at school and walking back before they got home so I could greet them.
> if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
I have my own kitchen, my own bathroom, I can do housework things like putting the laundry in while I'm on a break, I can be in for deliveries, etc.
I'd be most happy with a fully remote job, that has an option to go in to the office whenever I like. Some face time is valuable, but absolutely not 5 days of face time a week.
I go into the office once a fortnight and the commute takes 2 hours out of my day. If it was 5 mins away I'd maybe have a preference to up that to once a week, maybe a bit more of it wasnt open plan.
I think there is certainly benefit in being in the same physical space as the rest of the team on occasion. I don't think it has to be often though, even the kind of once every 6 months to a year thing some fully remote companies do might be enough to make a difference with team building.
> As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
Not enough information to answer that.
Is it an open office layout or a real office? If it is an open office, I will still need to work from home even if it's a 1 minute walk because it is impossible to get any work done in an open office.
But give me a real office with a closing door and I'll happily commute 30 minutes every day to use it.
Yes. My office is about a 10 minute walk away. I work from home when I need to get stuff done. There are simply fewer distractions. I go to the office when I do feel live having some idle chit chat or to be social. If I were 100% remote, I would not miss the office.
I do not have a separate office room at home, I work from my bedroom.
I had a short (5-10 minutes) commute through a small park/forest and it was perfect. Just enough time to wake up or decompress, but short enough that I could run if late and merely be out of breath.
That or an elevator ride to a different floor in a hybrid office/condo tower would be nice.
>There's a growing consensus that most people like having an office to go to (more social, separated from kids/partners, etc.) but hate to commute.
This is what they get for adopting a car-centric lifestyle.
>As a thought experiment, people should ask themselves: if I could walk 5 min to my office, would I still want to work from home?
I live in Tokyo, and it's about 10 minutes to walk to my office, and it's extremely safe. No, I don't want to work from home much, except maybe the days when there's a typhoon or I'm just not feeling well.
I live in Europe. And love working from home. It's not that I hate going to the office, but it's so convenient to have the possibility work from home, since some days I need to focus. I often get much more done from home, since the workplace has a lot of distractions. I also have a family, and I get much more time with them. I think Google would benefit from giving a little slack there.
I go to an office where they have the AC running on full blast. It's insane, I'm freezing inside, and then outside it's like 90 F. Why do office people do this? Is it like that in EU or is it just a NA thing?
Imagining your scenario is like utopia to me. I hate going on the bus, always some crazy homeless person there, but I don't want to pay for parking either.
I wouldn't mind the office if it was like that. Safe and easy to get to. What a dream.
Temperature is such a personal thing; it's almost impossible to satisfy an entire group: some like it hotter, some colder, some in-between. On average women get cold quicker then men. I always have the problem that it's either too hot or that there's not enough fresh air (one office didn't even have windows or AC, it was horrible and I had a headache by 2pm every day, mostly due to lack of fresh air).
Personal offices is the best solution; I had a job that did that. It was brilliant. it's also fairly rare unfortunately.
Older people also get colder than younger people. So a 20 year old male and a 60 year old female are not going to be even close in terms of preferred temperature.
Especially because I can communicate with my door if I'm in no distraction mode or not. I don't understand why doors are considered toxic, they're a god send. (see larger rant)
This is one of those things that really depends on the etiquette and expectations. We had a simple "if door closed == thinking deep thoughts == don't disturb unless urgent" etiquette, and it worked well, but this does need to be widely understood and communicated, otherwise it can indeed come off as "harsh" (especially if you're the only one doing it!)
Yeah I had a shared office once where we'd never close the door and it just felt useless. I think part of what causes this though is management. If they are very concerned about seeing you work then it never works. But that generally means there's other issues since they are micromanaging instead of leading.
My last in person employer was exactly described. I wore a sweatshirt in the summer, but my hands were always cold, and I looked forward to walking to lunch to warm up a bit.
I love it when the office is extremely cold. Makes me active and focused. I can always wear a jacket if I want to be warmer. On the other hand, if you set the temperature too high, some people will be unable to make themselves comfortable no matter what.
Big offices in the EU often do have AC, and sometimes have it set too cold. Smaller companies in older buildings often don't have AC and a much more pleasant atmosphere as a result. I'm not a fan of AC, but apparently some people like it. Also a reason to work from home: you work in an environment that you control, and aren't at the mercy of Facilities.
It's mainly a North American thing I think, because Americans are so fat. Fat people feel hot in temperatures that normal people find perfectly comfortable.
It's usually a ventilation duct aimed at your head and blowing cold air at you the whole day. Temperature could be around 70 degrees but it gets chilly when it is blowing at you all the time.
That seems like poor design, proper ventilation shouldn’t be directly aimed at any humans. But 70 degrees seems like a very standard temperature for indoors, I wouldn’t consider that cold.
"very standard" is debatable - in my country there's a law limiting AC in public spaces to 27°C (with a 2 degree tolerance, so really 25°C). 70 °F would be regarded by nearly everybody as too cold
I live in Europe (well, Eastern Europe) and couldn't afford to live in an apartment close to the office, so my commute from / to the suburb is 1.5 hours each way, I'd literally get mental health problems at 3 hours a day in the traffic.
So no way I'm returning to the office. Almost all employers here state at least hybrid work (3 office + 2 home) on paper but in reality with tacit acceptance from management it's nearly 100% remote only, with occasional meetup in the office. Like once per sprint or even less.
I agree. I used to occasionally take my daughter into the office in Copenhagen when she was 5. The first time I thought I'd have to sacrifice some of my work time to make sure she was Ok and stop her getting underfoot / disrupting anyone else. Instead she got taken away by the design department to help make company videos.
When I worked for the same company in America - no way. I wouldn't have even tried.
To me as someone without children, if I worked in that design department and was forced to work from the office, they’d have my resignation the morning of the second time this happened.
Get a babysitter or work from home.
I didn’t chose for people to have children that they miss all day. I shouldn’t be burdened at work by their choice. At least not twice.
Nobody was obligated to do anything. We had a lot of space in the office and she could have happily watched TV on her laptop and done some coloring in the corner with me. I would have left if she was disruptive, but she was very calm. The design department came and took her because they wanted to. I didn't ask them to look after her, I was actually reluctant to let her get involved. I would never have asked someone else to look after my kid, they actively wanted to involve her and asked me about bringing her in again.
I think in the circumstances your resignation would have made you look a total prat.
If I’m obligated to work at a place where I can’t avoid children, then I’ll find a different workplace.
Obviously I couldn’t say my reason for resigning out loud in polite company. Children are a joy and a treasure.
But I’m not the only one of your colleagues who secretly doesn’t want to hear anything about your children and resents you (the hypothetical “you”) for bringing them to work.
I’m just not allowed to admit it, even during an exit interview.
I don't really like being around kids either but they are part of life and I think your attitude shows how disconnected we've become from home and family at work in a quite negative way. When I was a kid I used to go into my father's office all the time in the 80s. Home and work and office and friends all seemed a little more intermingled.
working social systems instead of neoliberal theocrats with weapons/police/prison-complex.
Cities are walkable by design (most built before there were cars at all) and you can clearly correlate quality/quantity of public transport with quality of live.
More money ends up in regional projects/maintenance of public goods instead of either going into private billionaires pockets (trickle down!!…) and/or military industrial complex.
Specifically China: high coverage of CCTV and effective police forces. Like it or not, but even young women feel save going alone through a big city at night.
Specifically Japan: society is very collectivistic and people go out of their way to not even disturb others. People even carry their trash in their pocket instead of throwing it on the streets.
Specifically Europe: the richer you are, the higher the chances you live close to a city centre, villages/suburbs are for poor people/families/weirdos.
No, it’s not guns. They probably don’t help, but I think that’s way too simplistic. I’m not worried at all about having a gun pulled on me in San Francisco, but it can feel quite unsafe at times due to rampant drug use and untreated mental illness, burglary and theft, and general unsanitary conditions. I think it’s far more deep rooted in an American culture of hyper-individualism and anti-social behavior, said untreated mental illness and drug addiction, and poverty. Take guns away and I think 90% of the problem remains.
European engineer here. All you said is totally valid, but still, what people complain here is "forcing" to go back to the office. What advantage does forcing people to work out of their homes bring? It can only be justified with "companies don't trust their employees"
I’ve heard a lot of people saying ‘Why should I return to the office, I’m just as productive at home.’ at my work. And many people are, for the parts of their job which require little collaboration. But the company (via the leadership) sees this type of low collaboration work as being only a component of their jobs and so mandates hybrid working.
Individual employees may disagree, but they’re not the ones responsible for running the company, and they can’t pick and choose which components of their job they want to engage in.
Probably a case of management not understanding the job at hand. Certain jobs basically don't require true collaboration, actions are limited by process and rules. It's basically just a conversation they're getting, one that could be had via phone, video call or even email/teams/slack.
I'm sure that's true for certain jobs at certain levels, but in my industry most people need to closely collaborate with people from different disciplines on an almost daily basis.
> I'm one of those weirdos who hates going in to the office.
I feel like a weird one for the opposite of that. It is nice having the option of working from home, or from my parents in the next county and I need to bob off to look after them, and the cats certainly appreciate me being around more when I WFH, but I don't get on with it long term. I like home being home and work being work, and I generally prefer work to stay out of my home.
I also prefer working in the same room as the people I'm working with¹ and consider hybrid to be a lie. We are officially hybrid, but really I'm remote most of the time because even though I go to the office many of the people I'm working with usually do not. Not that I begrudge other people doing what works best for them, and we get the job done so I don't see a productivity problem, but my level of comfort or lack thereof might mean I go for a bigger career change if I decide to move on from here (because every tech company I know locally seems to be the same in those respects).
Having said that I have the advantage of being near the office, a 15 minute walk² through a relatively nice city (York, the real one in the UK), so I don't have to factor a long commute into my likes/dislikes.
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[1] I think I'm sometimes seen as difficult for avoiding phone and video calls as I really don't find them comfortable: unless it is a group thing or a situation that benefits from screen sharing either come talk to be _really_ in person or send IMs/emails.
[2] Or a 10 minute jog when running late, or much longer if I take a more scenic route
It's really telling how those of us in Europe have much different opinions than those of us in America. The office was horrible back there, here I enjoy going in tuesday-thursday.
For me it is less about distance from home/commute, but isolation/distractions.
It is easy to get distracted and unless I have an office where I can __close a door__, I want to work from home (I live alone). I'd prefer the office. I don't need isolation all the time. But when I do, it is critical or I'm not getting any work done. It is already difficult enough with Slack and everything pinging me all the time, despite trying to minimize notifications I can receive (I'm religious about this). People @channel instead of @here, so even muted channels ping me. Every app has poor notifications that are "get a billion pings", "in theory this work, in practice you get the same", and "no notifications." (seriously, how is this not solved?) I can't do the latter or my boss gets mad, and the other two just ping me all day. It's false positive overload.
At least in the office I can turn off all my notifications, turn my computer on focus mode, turn my music up, and rely on the fact that if someone really needs me, they'll __knock on my door__ (or have someone do it for them). But many places have open floor plans or cubicles, and these are worse than slack. Don't get me wrong, I love the collaboration and I think being localized does help people work as a team. Whiteboard collaborations are an essential tool when working as a team. But at the same time, there are times where I need to just be left alone to get my work done. The door lets me clearly visually communicate this to my coworkers. So give me an office with a door (don't cheat with a glass room) or send me home. You're paying me to work, right?
Imagine this not being the case. And I don't mean a different district, but some neighbouring town. Not many people like to live in a city, and it's also not scaleable for a company to have most of its employees living around a specific office. Especially true for EU cities that all have huge satellite regions with cozy villages and small towns.
Zürich Switzerland or any other city/town in Switzerland. You will see very young kids going to school alone taking public transport. They are taught at an early age how to deal with crosswalks etc. (In Switzerland all traffic is required to stop at a cross walk for pedestrians, there is only an exception for trams and buses however those will stop for children), waiting until the car has completely stopped and only then crossing. School kids also all wear a high visibility type sash on their commute.
do you live in europe or are you an american on a working vacation? if the later, it might just be the novelty of it making it interesting or the location of the hotel and office being close
> My company has offices in Europe and I _love_ going to the office over there. Hate it in America. Love it in Europe
I was in US only once for business travel, in large city. Seeing the sea of people during rush hours on the sidewalk and in trains, moving towards dense "downtown" looked like every hollywood movie, in negative way. I like commuting by bicycle in European cities.
Lots of people commuting to the city centre isn't a US thing. Paris and London are the same - and I'm sure other cities I haven't experienced. It's a big city thing.
I live about 2 miles from my work. The campus is beautiful. The building are gorgeous. The work environment is top notch. Between my house and campus is a nice 15 minute bike ride on paths through forests. It’s quite a nice and easy ride. Or I could drive there in about the same amount of time.
I hate it. I completely refuse to go in. I am working from home until they fire me.
I hate the time it takes to get ready. I hate the time commuting there and back. I hate not being in my own home. I hate having to pack a lunch. I hate not seeing my family as frequently.
My commute is around half an hour in one direction, and it’s mostly enjoyable (7-8 minutes walking, 22 minutes in metro). What I hate is getting ready. My first meeting is at 10am, and I have to wake up at least at 8 if I’m going to the office (have a bite, take my dog out, shower and stuff). If I’m working from home, I can get up at 9:45.
While having colleagues around is sometimes beneficial, everything else is worse. My chair at home is more comfortable, I can keep the light dimmed, I can fart freely, I don’t have to wear shoes all day, etc.
I've worked in a lot of open offices in Europe, but they're not the hellish places that American open offices seem to be from what I keep hearing about them.
Well, one was: at Adyen, way too many people in a single room, on tiny desks, with nothing to separate different teams. That looked like a terrible place to work.
I went to Europe on a work retreat with all my coworkers last month, ~1/2 of whom are based there, and came to the same conclusion. “Oh, it’s actually just America that is so wildly inhospitable, not being back in the office.”
When I visit Europe for business, etc. I tend to stay in core downtown. A lot of my co-workers in Europe don't actually do that and drive to an office outside the city.
For me, it’s more about the habitability of the European cities themselves than anything related to the relative commutes. It’s quite nice to be able to step outside the office for lunch or a coffee, sit in the park, and see others (of all ages) enjoying well-designed public spaces. Thats mostly impossible outside a handful of major metropolitan areas in the US, and then there, largely only in specific, wealthy neighborhoods. You have to get in a car, drive to Panera or whatever other miserable chain, quickly eat your microwaved meal, and then drive back before your break is over.
Yes, although where I work, most of our main European offices are not in the city. (This is true in North America as well.) We have some smaller satellite offices in cities proper but they're mostly for customer and other visits.
It sure does feel like most anti-office people do complain about multi hour commutes and being stuck in traffic or whatever. That is very much American issue.
I haven’t found my European colleagues to be any nicer than the American ones. In fact, they’re often more straightforward in ways that would seem inappropriate or cruel in America.
What they are not, however, is so deeply motivated by fear that if they lose their job, they’ll lose their house/health insurance/families, be labeled a worthless outcast by society etc. That seems to be the primary difference in determining how toxic people’s behavior is in the workplace.
I think Americans are nicer in general than Europeans (which is weird the first time you work with them), but not disturbingly nice like Koreans and Indians (sorry for the cliché but it's true).
Europeans are rude in comparison.
But those are general culture traits. Corporate working culture traits in America are the worst. Even the northeast Asian usual 'this seems dumb, but my manager/chief want it, so I will execute rather than asking for explanations' isn't as insupportable as American office politics (well, in my case it was a partnership Corp+research institute I worked with, so I guess it might have skewed my judgment)
Most of the engineers I know aren’t worried about getting another job. Everyone I know laid off from Big Tech the past year found another job instantly. Probably it’s more true for other roles
I saw a Twitter thread about this that I didn’t want to engage in there, but figure I might get more intelligent discussion here. Basically there’s a motif like “we should allow people to work where they’re most comfortable and productive!”, but what about the folks that are most comfortable and productive in an office surrounded by other folks also working on the same product as them?
On one hand I don’t think people who don’t want to work should be forced in, but on the other it seems like a lot of companies are taking this as an opportunity to get rid of offices all together. Just look at recent “who’s hiring’s”: the majority are exclusively remote, leaving folks like me who would prefer to work with others and don’t mind moving no options.
This doesn't seem like a hard problem, if you want to work in an office seek out companies that are working in the office. What's the issue here? Plenty of companies require it and are slowly enforcing it. I don't know where you live but plenty of companies in Boston, which use to be remote, are requiring more people to come in the office now (DataDog, Klaviyo, Chewy, all the finance/insurance companies, DOD contractors, and lots of the satellite big tech offices like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, SalesForce, etc are requiring it).
Are you upset that more interesting companies/problems to work on are mostly remote teams? Remote work is one of the few hard, real, and sought after benefits people want that a company of any size can provide to stay competitive in the labor market.
As for me, I have no problem working in an office but the commute needs to be less than an hour of walk + subway/bus otherwise it's too much of a negative externality. Maybe there should be more offices where people live and not massively congregated into a single location? You can blame poor planning for that. There's no reason why there can't be more mixed developed neighborhoods.
Having worked across the full spectrum of company shapes and sizes, the absolute most fun I’ve had and most productive I’ve been (and my entire team has been) is in startups where everyone is working together in the same office, passionate about the same project. This has coincided with places I can easily walk to/from work.
Yes big companies are still in-office, but they’re dull and slow by comparison. The type of experience (and level of productivity!) I’ve had with the micro-to-small scale startups in-office seems all but gone.
At large companies with distributed teams, work from office makes no sense. Post pandemic, I started commuting in, only to sit outside or in a hallway on zoom calls, and then eat (excellent) cafeteria food that is bad for my health.
I traded that for a full remote job, and 4 hours for exercising a week. My watch says all my health trends have been markedly improving ever sense.
I wouldn’t mind an in-office job with a strong, 100% local team, but that’s rare these days, especially since I don’t want to move across Silicon Valley or deal with anything longer than a bike commute (and I am not the only one!).
My org became remote during covid, we are split across 4 cities, 3 of which in the same country even. Now we are told to go back to the office 3/5 days ... only to use the same tools to work remotely. In the office, there's none else from my team; and the only other person I know is my skip manager.
I have expressed multiple times here that I like the office, and I go 5/5 days with some exceptions, because the 45 minute commute on foot allows me to decompress and relax. I know that when I reach home, there's no more work.
Funnily enough, I prefer it like this because I have fewer interruptions.
I was thinking that way, then I realized I could take the 45 minutes (in my case, 48 minutes), and use it to jog, bike a beautiful hilly trail, or strength train, and get 5x the benefit for the same amount of time.
Yes that’s my exact problem - I’m sick of all the damn zooms. I watched as my team went from 15 minutes of standup where everyone was literally standing up face to face and the rest of the day was a mix of dedicated work and ad-hoc collaboration to literal hours of just sitting in online meetings, but exclusively those of the least productive sort. Ugh.
The product reflects it too - in the year since I’ve left no new significant features have come out.
It seems like a very unusual desire to specifically want to work in-person with people on the same project, rather than working in close collaboration with friends/coworkers you get along with. There are many people I've worked with that I absolutely don't want to be in the same room as, and some that made lab-type environments fun.
You don't get to choose with in-office. Everyone's forced to work together. Is there something about working on livestream/groupchat video that you don't find as an acceptable alternative? My office has a dedicated session for that once a week if people want to join, though it's been pretty empty since lockdown lifted.
I don't think it's that unusual. I generally like my colleagues, and given that the work I do is highly collaborative I have a strong preference to reducing all barriers to communication. I don't know anyone that claims the quality of communication they have remotely is at the level of in-person.
Have you never interviewed your team before accepting a position? That seems to be the missing part here. And working with friends and family is fine I suppose, but working with people who you share goals with and can actively collaborate with is better in my experience.
The set of people I may have to work closely with is in the dozens. I certainly didn't meet all of them during interviews or even ask to arrange it. Statistically I'm just not going to like every single one of them on a personal level, even though we can work together professionally.
Oh, most people want people to be able to work the way they work best. Many companies leadership are morally opposed to a remote work environment as they view it as a degradation of their direct power over people, a refutation of how they became successful, impinges on their preferred way of working, and diminishes the stage they can perform on. But this is an argument of passions. On the other hand, once the passions die, what you’re pointing out sets in - and it was setting in before the pandemic. Real estate is expensive, and if you can offload office space to the employee, you improve earning per share materially. In the end this is all that will matter. But it’ll take a while for the dinosaurs in charge to retire enough that enterprising directors of finance can pitch the board successful the end of mass corporate real estate holdings. Forward thinking companies will keep smaller offices and coop work spaces for those that truly feel a deep need to be in the office. The rest will require you to BYOO (bring your own office)
My guess is that established companies (esp. those with existing offices) will require on-site work, new companies without will more likely not... more flexibility for founders and reduced costs if they believe in remote.
That should leave everyone with plenty of options, but on-site + startup combo would have fewer positions and vice-versa remote + established company.
Otoh, over time I could see a profound shift to remote if these new companies were to start replacing old ones and remote worked for them. But there might be a limit where a certain company size favors on-site.
Unfortunately the best work experiences I’ve had are in micro-small scale startups in SF/NY where I walk to work every day, sit in the same office with a couple/handful of people who I know are passionate about the same problems I am, and we all have the opportunity to brain-dump in person at will. Arraigning zooms will never compadre to the fidelity of a face to face interaction.
I like working in office and working at home equally. I have a more comfortable setup at home. I have a proper home office. Working from home allows me to do my best work at peace.
Working in office with people gives me a sense of belonging. It also makrs a clear distinction between working and non working hours. But my commute sucks. It's 1.5 hours one way! Moving closer is not an option. I would prefer to go to office on alternate days so I can have the best of both worlds.
I think this is it. I prefer in the office but I have a pleasant 20 minute cycle into the office. The commute is actually a highlight of the day. Then I have my own office, and a bunch of insightful conversations that I wouldn't otherwise have had.
If I had 1.5 hour commute well of course I'd feel differently!
Definitely agree on the hours - I remember the days I’d leave work at 6-7 and not even have the ability to work any more until the next day at 9-10. Contrast that to pandemic where suddenly everyone is expected to have the capacity to be on any time.
> leaving folks like me who would prefer to work with others and don’t mind moving no options.
This reminds me of when Christians in America say they're being persecuted, when of course, they're dominant. I think it would be a good idea to acknowledge that "wanting to work with others in the office" is the norm, not unusual. If this is truly your preference, don't worry, you aren't losing your dominance any time soon.
I think there is a general acceptance in the leadership of most established companies that fully remote isn't ideal. Obviously there will be companies that don't want to spend the money for an office space and there will be employees who seek fully remote, but I don't think that will be the only game in town by any means.
Personally I wouldn't consider a fully remote job.
It's like the paradox of tolerance, right? You can pick the best working environment for yourself, except to the extent that your choice infringes on your coworkers' ability to pick the best working environments for themselves.
Does anyone else feel like this mostly undermines the entire point of "tech" and "the web"?
What the hell is the point of having a hyper connected, super charged by AI world, when ultimately it boils down to having to "go to an office"?
I honestly feel like 95% of tech is smoke and mirrors, the people who own "tech" know this so they end up just asking people to come back to work to help them sell advertisements, which seems like the only way we know how to make money from all this "innovation".
Great point. For at least the last three decades, everything in tech is about "connectivity", "mobility", "cyberspace" and recently "telepresence" and "metaverse". And yet, the solution they use for themselves an 18th century invention: the office building.
I think these are data backed decisions. Most big tech hasn'r given the actual data but Meta was at least open that they saw a difference in performance scores of people who work in office vs who work remote, specially the new ones.
This is the same Google that routinely ends up writing off billions of dollars in a product even before launching the first stable version of it, they will not hesitate to sell their real estate if they saw remote work was more effective.
If you even have to ask this, you haven't interacted with many normal people working from home. Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids. I bet your normal young dev with small child at home (even with their spouse taking care of the kid) does half as much work as they could have had they been at the office.
Yes. yes. offices have brain drain in form of small talk and whatever, but at least you in a different environment and detached from your home. And yes there are some people who have the luxury of separate home office and if you dont have kids then that could easily be better for you. However we aren't maximizing only you but your team, your department, and ideally whole company.
My office has a loud sales team, a loud sales bell, chairs that nearly touch each other back-to-back, A/C that dries out my throat, people who spend 20 minutes chatting at desks, stupid policies that I can't keep up with (and daily moaning about something in Slack) and lots of viruses.
My office has none of that. The biggest distraction is the nice view out of my window.
Horses for courses and YMMV
All it took was a little discipline not to be tempted to some chores doing the day. Pretty easy to overcome that
Offices are even more full of distractions, over which you have far less control.
At home, I can designate my own closed office. I have full control. I can remain distraction-free.
How does that compare to an open-plan office? People constantly walking and talking around you, many of whom have nothing to do with your job. You simply can't control that. You can't control the noise. You can't control being called into useless meetings or getting pulled into senseless distracting conversations. If you're a senior, you might get pinged multiple times every hour by juniors asking for advice, instead of being able to buffer these interruptions once every hour or two. Hard to buffer requests and questions when they are a tap on the shoulder instead of a message waiting in some inbox.
You conveniently left out the part about some people having the luxurity of personal office. The amount of people I see working on their coach or at kitchen table far out weight the amount of people who actually have a whole room dedicated to their work. I for one don't have extra room just for work, but at least I have dedicated computer table, so I dont have to share the kitchen table or the coffee table.
Not sure what you earn, but I think the average tech salary can get you an enormous place in a non-centrally located area of basically any city.
Even in the UK, where home prices are exorbitant right now, you can get a 4 bedroom home in the outskirts of Birmingham for the same price of a 2 bedroom flat in central Birmingham.
Heres a couple of homes to show the price difference. Note: that the prices themselves are not relevant only that they're the same.
I was just giving an illustration of how it is, in one of the most skewed markets for engineer income to house price ratio.
I said if you don't have to live centrally, you can put that money into a bigger house, and it pays significantly more (double the number of bedrooms, not just dedicated office space).
You dont want to do that? thats fine, but you cant pretend that its materially more expensive to have a home office if suddenly you are not geolocked.
But we all are geolocked to some extent or can you just pack up your family and announce that you are moving to Ghana because you found cheap house there? Probably not.
Of course I could take on debt and buy a bigger apartment - probably even from the same building complex - but that feels like insane solution to "going to office every week" unless again you live in America where your commute is 8 hour drive through wild gang lands where you have to be vigilant 24/7 just not to get shot.
Half a mil will buy you a decent house outside of London and very little within it.
Of course that only works if you can work from home for a London based tech company.
From my own experience, I'm very grateful to be able to do that from my home office in the UK, outside of London. I hate long commutes or living in big cities.
The typical engineer will absolutely be able to afford this, especially as their remote status allows them to live in a low-cost location where they can rent a small house with a yard for the cost of 1br in SF.
If pay for UK engineers is so low, and housing costs are so high, that you cannot possibly afford a place with a private office - then your condition is materially different than US engineers. So much so that the discussion of your situation should be separate.
Either way, I don't see the point of your arguments. Nobody says that engineers who want to work from the office shouldn't be allowed to. We're just refuting the bogus argument that the office is some sort of distraction-free paradise offering ideal work conditions, compared to noisy WFH setups. Because for the vast majority of US engineers, it's rather the opposite.
It’s a perfectly reasonable question to have asked. Well, of course it’s worse isn’t an answer. Why is it hard to get actual numbers?
My companies productivity numbers all went up after WFH (lots of productivity metrics that we track and publish internally). If the numbers are worse can’t google at least say “we measured productivity before/after and it’s worse”.
This has become some kind of political thing it seems.
What? Am I the only one working in a company that measures measures measures? I would be surprised if you work somewhere that cannot measure production of something that equates to value.
People with small children are in the minority. There are plenty that do not have children and others whose children are old enough and independent enough to go about their day without bothering their parents.
People are only truly productive in short bursts of say 45 minutes or so. WFH offers more opportunities to take these with your flow rather than disruptions midway. There's also additional factors such as fatigue and stress from commutes, lack of rest time before the next day.
How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out? I sure haven't since I dont bump into people at my home. But that happened often back in the office days.
It is not only chasing some personal flow state - having physical presence where you can just talk with people has a lot of not so obvious benefits that no amount of emailing or IM-ing or zooming can fix.
I guess it really depends on your team. But with my team 3 our of 8 have multiple young kids constantly disrupting work.
> How many times during past 3 years have you pumped into someone at work and just offhandedly started to discuss what you are working on and actually helped one of you out?
Literally never.
This has never happened to me.
Whereas firing a message into group chat has yielded results all the time, and also effective collaboration on account of we're both at our computers, all the tools are right there, and moving information around precisely is easy.
I've also discovered I don't actually hate pair programming, I just hate trying to crowd a workstation when two-way screen sharing is possible and I can throw multiple 4K monitors at the problem.
On the other hand I definitely quit the second job I ever had after 2 years because I could not deal with the noise in the open plan office, or someone scratching the hell out of a porcelain bowl with a fork every single day right behind me for what seemed like 1.5 hours.
Those interactions do occur via phone call or teams chat. The in office ones tended to be procedural, send me a task. Something they in truth knew the answer to anyway. When they actually wanted help, they'd ask me regardless of the format.
That's poor etiquette on your team members part, a gentle request from your manager to those offenders should help. No different to someone not answering their phone etc. I do believe a more casual approach to taking calls when WFH is best, but that's just taking advantage.
Sometimes young parent's are not self aware in my, perhaps controversial opinion (it's understandable it happens kids take over their lives), but don't take it out on the rest of us.
Homes are full of distractions, especially if you have small kids.
Given the choice, every parent I know would choose to work from home with the distraction of their children rather than have to pay something like 25% of their salary on childcare.
The guy insisting on having an hours long zoom meeting at his desk is actually a lot more distracting than my cat.
(I've mentioned to my boss that we should ban zoom meetings at desks and force people to use meeting rooms, but doesn't seem like anyone is listening to me yet)
Just like everyone got a bunch of ultra low interest mortgages & now will never consider relocating, a bunch of employees got work remote jobs at companies & positions that will be much harder to get again.
It's really insane how if I tried to buy the same house I bought 5 years ago my payment would be right under 3x. At 40 it would be almost cheaper for me to retire than to move -- especially from Austin to California.
I bought 8 years ago. My mortgage is a couple hundred less than a crappy one bedroom apartment now. Would probably be better off getting a job at Walmart or something than move.
> My mortgage is a couple hundred less than a crappy one bedroom apartment now.
the total cost of ownership is not just the mortgage interest payments - it must include the cost of the equity you invested, which is both the initial deposit as well as any principle payments made so far.
If you added all this up, it would be quite likely similar to the cost in rent of a similar house/apartment.
Not true, you don’t have the same stability as person owning a house does.
You always have to be prepared to move, can’t change stuff without landlords approval, can’t buy nice stuff (good luck moving your 80 inch TV with your nice leather couch).
None of this is relevant though. “Not true, you don’t have the same flexibility as a person renting does. You always have to be prepared for significant maintenance, etc. etc.”
The point is that financially we expect that two approaches to be comparable, perhaps with renters paying a bit for that flexibility and shorter term commitment. (That they aren’t over a particular period is fortunate for those that managed to time the market).
> I think the idea is that if you rented that whole time and invested your money in the stock market you'd be just as well off
The OP said their mortgage is already lower than rent, which is typical, so it is the homeowner who has extra money left over (compared to if they were renting) to invest every month. The renter has ever-increasing rent swallowing up any raises, so not much left over to invest.
It's probably true that you'd be financially equivalent, but some people don't prefer to move with little notice due to rental changes forced upon them.
I suppose if you account for this extra cost (which may be non-monetary, but one can always assign the inconvenience using a dollar figure...) then renting could be worse off.
Yeah, I don't even care if owning a house is financially worse than renting. It's mine! There's no landlord who decides to inspect it, or evict me. The cost of the mortgage is subject to a pre-determined process, and I can fix it to provide predictability. I can extend it, improve it, fix it or redecorate it. It represents power over my circumstances, and long term stability. How do you put monetary value on that?
it is possible to make a guess at the monetary value of these advantages, by comparing the difference between the cost of renting vs cost of owning (including cost of capital). Of course, the value of owning is different between different people (some might prefer renting due to the flexibility of moving at a moments' notice for example).
And in fact, if it turns out that owning is lower cost in total (even taking into account the cost of capital), then it would make a lot of sense to buy! And in some areas, this is definitely true.
Idk my mortgage is about the same as rent in a medium apartment in dfw and def. Less than rent for a house and dfw is not a super high cost place to live. I have a family of 4 people living here plus a MIL in a smaller house built adjacent and over the garage. Renting the equivalent would mean probably 3 separate apartments.
The big question we should be asking ourselves, particularly in a mostly virtual service economy, is why it is the people that have to move and not the businesses that need the people.
Why do we have a society where social standing is determined by how far away from your mum you have to live to get a job?
Ultimately this will be determined in the marketplace. The best thing a startup can do at present is master remote management. Then it can get good people cheap.
IMO remote works better in big co vs. small co, since you will never interact with a large amount of teams in person. They can be and will be many offices away. Big co has issues in adopting the latest tools, but that's about it.
Honestly, I got a job last year in a hybrid office and i love it. We are treated like adults. We can step out if we need to. We can remote in an extra day or come in an extra day if we feel like it. I also love my team and hanging out at our desks was something I didn't realize I missed until I had it again.
Remote is cool. Full time strict office is blah. Hybrid flex is lovely
I recently joined a team that meets in the office once per week on Wednesday. It was nice to go in for the novelty, my office is very nice so it was kind of like going to an expensive hotel for a day. I didn’t feel any less or more productive though. It was good to overhear the insanity of very very junior people and be able to correct them before they try to type it out however.
Personally I highly prefer the office. I hate the commute but prefer the office. It’s a great conundrum for me.
I guess this is a hot take - but I miss the pre pandemic days when most people were in the office most days.
My takeaway from this experience is to bemoan the construction of US society around cars. If we all lived close to the office and or had quicker / easier transport maybe this would be less of a problem.
For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community. Going forward, we’ll consider new remote work requests by exception only.”
now.. maybe it's just me, but re-reading that sentence makes my eye note "AND WHO LIVE NEAR" as well as CONSIDER SWITCHING as well as EXCEPTION ONLY.
Is EXCEPTION ONLY limited? how do we know?
what about "how big is LIVE NEAR" as a cohort.
The article is a hot take I want to believe too, but legalistic reading says its "doesn't want" in the sense of "want, not is not permitting"
nobody is being strongarmed, from whats read above. There's getout clauses a-plenty for any authorised manager to 'exception' their way out of this.
Google doesn't want people to leave en mass, or unionise either. Want doesn't drive hard sometimes. The real world intrudes.
Depending on the org, most Google employees are already part of a distributed team. This is nothing but making management appear functional and bean counters that manage the buildings feel like their buildings are being used.
Or they’re legitimately seeing the dire condition Google has been finding itself in with the lack of product success and increasing existential threats of LLM’s, the declining health of the open web from which they derive their profits, etc etc, and taking a hard look in the bloat they have in their existing workforce.
If management is heavily signaling they don’t want remote work, believe them. When the layoffs come, the remote workers will be very close to the front of the line to get the axe.
> they’re legitimately seeing the dire condition Google has been finding itself in with the lack of product success and increasing existential threats of LLM’s, the declining health of the open web from which they derive their profits, etc
<vent>
And, leaping into action, carrying the banner of innovation, they're declaring their bold vision of the future: getting sneezed on 20 times a day while attending the exact same meetings as before.
Plus, many people get an extra bonus in this future: the addition of 1-3 hours of commute time per day. (Thanks to terrible traffic in every single part of the Bay Area, this is true for many more people than you might imagine.) Time entirely wasted, that neither their family nor their business will benefit from.
The saddest part of this stupidity is that all teams still have to collaborate globally anyway. So everyone's still going to spend time dialing into meetings, fumbling with microphones, and running into A/V issues — except now it'll be compounded by the fact that there'll never be a meeting room available, and all the equipment will be covered in a fine layer of snot from everyone sneezing on everything.
The fundamental issue with the "RTO or not" question is not the debates about the science of productivity. It's simply the fact that any business choosing to spend time on this is already displaying a failure of judgment and lack of focus.
Entire markets are getting overturned by the arrival of AI, and these people are navel-gazing about desk occupancy rates.
I find this kind of debate can be polarizing because people have such different mindsets and perspectives on the world. If you view the office as just a “fine layer of snot”, I can only imagine what you think of the subway, or a mall. But people sneezing and fighting traffic aren’t critiques of the office, they’re critiques of leaving your house and going outside…
We have immune systems for a reason, and fear of illness (without it coming from your doctor) is not a good reason to be against RTO. People get sick all the time, it’s a normal and necessary process to build our natural immunity. I worry about the damage covid did in making people still paranoid about going in public (e.g. people who continue to feel the need to wear masks today without a medical reason).
You imply there’s no value to being in person, but would you really rather catch up with friends over zoom rather than over dinner? Call someone over FaceTime rather than get coffee and go on a walk? Work relationships matter, sharing 3D space allows people to be more creative and collaborative, and companies are recognizing that. Google seems like the last company that would make people come back to the office without doing their homework, there’s clearly data showing that fully remote employees are falling behind.
> Work relationships matter, sharing 3D space allows people to be more creative and collaborative, and companies are recognizing that. Google seems like the last company that would make people come back to the office without doing their homework, there’s clearly data showing that fully remote employees are falling behind.
A couple things I wanted to point out when reading this:
- RTO does not imply sharing a 3D space with those you collaborate with (e.g. distributed teams).
- There is no data that proves that in-person work is more "creative" or "collaborative", simply because it's not measurable.
- You assume Google's intentions to always driven by data rather than appealing to stakeholders.
- RTO is entirely about sharing 3D spaces with those you collaborate, agree that if the team you work directly with is distributed there’s little value to RTO to me, direct team in office and other teams distributed seems more common
- they are not mutually exclusive, I do very much assume google uses data AND appeals to stakeholder value. I don’t hold the view that stakeholder value is purely maximizing productivity, I think google does their homework before making big decisions.
This is an internet comment section. "Going outside" is always an unpopular opinion here. Also, many of the people here are younger, don't have kids, think they never will, think they'll never have to manage people etc.
These aren't going to be particularly productive, unfortunately.
The number of laid off techworkers that understand the juiciest parts of their former employers market that are now doing their own thing is significant.
Layoffs will not help these tech giants.
The political and technical structures inside of Big Tech are largely performative, vast swaths of these orgs have literally no skin in the game.
Nodding strongly in agreement as somebody who resigned Big Tech to start my own thing and hired remote first to get premium talent.
That’s the other part of startups wanting remote - you get WAY more access to talent compared to a few years ago when remote-first was weird and scary.
Likewise, Big Tech haven’t had to compete for so long they forgot the number one rule is to keep the talent happy.
Personally, I’m a lot happier now than I was with a big fancy level at a Mega Co.
I buy that... but real talk, there's gotta be a ton of bloat in the engineering org, no?
I've never worked at Google but I know shitloads of Googlers. And listening to their work problems... it sounds like engineers outnumber the other functions like 10:1 (at a minimum) but still produce mind-bogglingly slow estimates for the simplest shit. Like... 9 months to create a settings page. 6 months to change a few pages cumulatively simpler than a CRUD app.
Is it the systems they have to work with? The approvals to connect to this or that? Is everything within Eng bureaucratized to fucking hell and back? Or are >50% of them completely faking it and utterly useless? What the hell's going on there?
Edit: for context... yes, the abstracted examples I'm giving are coming for the perspective of PM / Design / Marketing folks. And when I ask my Eng Googler friends they get awkward and cagey and seem to not want to say anything mean about anyone.
All of the above. Sometimes the system you need to change was written six years ago by an intern from another team that was defragged, in a framework that isn't supported anymore, and everyone keeps piling the tech debt higher.
Some parts of Eng are mind-blowingly incompetent. Google is remarkable not for "hiring the best people" but for how widely the quality varies by org. Some orgs have a reputation for incompetence.
Security and Privacy is a great example. Half the org is fanatical about protecting users, smart, effective, the works...and the other half is fanatical about ticking the right boxes on their forms and putting roadblocks in front of product teams because it makes them look important. Try getting something done when someone from the second group is paying attention to you, and yeah, it'll take nine months to launch a settings page.
Yes, there's bloat, but it's not as simple as "there are too many people so MMM ruins your productivity".
Not saying I agree with it, just that it’s not the idle threat OP was making it out to be… if the bean counters who are saying “something must be done” are actually in charge, maybe it doesn’t matter whether it’s really about performance…
I am not saying the threat is idle. I am saying the action is unwarranted, the performative play is real for all levels. Sundar is larping as a leader. He is at best a substitute teacher.
If a company is trying to make me dance like a monkey, I would rather get laid off. Either they appreciate productivity, or I will be happy to be out of there.
They are getting their lunch eaten by Microsoft which allows remote. Azure is killing gcloud, Office365 is dominating GSuite. Not to mention msft owning 49% of openAi. Google needs to fire their leadership since it’s strategy failures and not tactical errors.
I don't think Google has anything to worry about, but it's funny to see how widespread this sentiment is. Just goes to show how good of a story teller Satya is.
Asserting that GCP is profitable while Azure is not doesn't necessarily determine their respective successes. A company might reinvest all its revenue back into growth and innovation, hence posting zero profit - this doesn't signify poor performance. Conversely, a company reporting a profit could potentially be stagnating, inflating profits to appease shareholders potentially seeking to exit. Profitability alone isn't a comprehensive measure of a company's health or potential.
> Google invented LLMs
Poor argument. E.g. Xerox invented GUI, where are they now?
Reinvesting profits doesn't mean you didn't have profits. Msft, aapl, goog, meta all reinvest profits in new ventures. Only Amazon can't manage to make a buck and tries to pass it off as reinvestment.
Wrt azure vs gcp, I just don't think you can say azure is "killing it" when it's a loss leader for the company. Gcp has proven it can operate profitably, we don't know if azure ever will. Right now its business model approximates Uber.
Google also invented "cloud" and is in last place. Invention counts for little.
Google is over-run with MBAs who are busy complecting and burning their employer to the ground while cycling back into the competition (Azure and AWS).
Google's internal machine provisioning model was already automated and accessible via an API, it would have been recognizable as a "cloud", but it was internal only. The kernel changes that enabled OpenVZ and Docker were done by Google engineers.
In the same way OpenAI shipped a business on transfomers (invented by Google). Google invents stuff, but then is last to its own party.
Or the Ramones of the 70s. They play a show and everyone in the audience goes home and starts a punk band and becomes wildly more successful (across multiple definitions of “success”).
When I hear company is calling workers back to office, it means things are going bad and insecure managers want to show they can whip the workers to deliver. Like a last ditch effort.
If I was in that situation, as a remote worker, I'd start looking for a new job.
If we are totally honest though, people working in a google office generally have fewer private distractions like porn, taking naps on a sofa, watching Succession, playing with their cat etc. Reading the discussion on Blind is very illuminating on this, like one guy claiming to have frequent sex with his wife during the workday.
If you're getting your work done even when you take mid-day sex breaks, why is that the company's business? Employers claim to be able to measure productivity to give raises and fire unproductive employees, but they somehow can't figure out if someone working from home is productive? Do managers need to physically look over an employee's shoulder to figure out if he's productive?
Oh how awful someone uses their life to have sex rather than sit in a dark cubicle being bored out of their mind, hoping time will pass until the next paycheck comes in. Such better way of living.
I find it funny how people equate office = 10hr hard and efficient work vs WFH = 2 mins of work, rest watching tv and having sex.
The truth is people do as much work as they're motivated to do and as much as they have to do. There's teams at Google who never are allowed to launch anything due to corporate bullshit politics. I have a friend who has been there 15 years, maybe one or two of his small feature products launched, dozens got cancelled. Like a good soldier he goes to the office because he feeds his family with Google dollars. That's it.
If you need to be in an office to be able to focus on work (or healthy supplements to work, like exercise and sex with your partner) instead of taking naps or bingeing junk, you have bigger problems, like immaturity, lack of personal discipline, burnout / alienation, and/or severe depression. Being in the office won't fix any of those things - it will mask them in an unhealthy way that will do neither you nor your loved ones any favors in the long run.
I don't understand what having sex with your partner has to do with work, unless it's directly interfering with it. In fact it probably makes your work better.
I'm going to assume the people complaining about this don't have much sex.
It's a good extreme example of something that the work place really claims that is way out of the bounds of what they expect you to do during work. On top of that, it's considered to be less appropriate than gossiping at the water cooler.
If an employee is given an hour lunch break off campus, and they use it to have sex, the only reason I can understand someone being mad is if they're jealous. Substitute {having sex} with {driving aimlessly} to {eating lunch} and it should be the same thing to the employer - the employee is off campus and not subject to workplace expectations.
I've heard no shortage of stories from coworkers at big-tech or fancy startups in the past couple of years where line-level managers simply aren't able to make the tough decisions.
A third of your team is getting practically nothing done? Are you having the tough conversations that need to happen? Or do you not want to rock the boat (it might not look great on you, either, especially if your peer managers aren't taking things seriously).
You're right, you can't hide forever. People do get fired. And in a couple cases this has ultimately resulted in the managers getting fired too when higher-ups realized the sheer obviousness of "they aren't doing a single thing" that was being ignored.
Failures all around, but I get why one would say "we didn't have this level of complete abdication back when people were in the office" and take that as the easy solution rather than trying to make huge swaths of both their managers and employees get way better discipline, extremely quickly.
The biggest factor for RTO/Hybrid for most, is that they moved to a lower cost area. I was in South Bay - bough a 70 year old just before pandemic - a small house for a lot of money. I found a huge, value for money house, 1.5 hours away from the south bay, for far less and sold off my south bay one.
There's no way I'm coming back to south bay and pay more in rent for a small apartment than I pay in mortgage. Even hybrid is a pain with commute totaling 3-4 hours on weekdays
> The email also reminds [non-remote-designated] employees […] that managers can factor their absences into performance reviews.
Requiring on-site vs remote work is one thing; tying it to performance considerations is another. If an employee is performing well against all other standards and isn’t causing collaboration problems, but has absences against the on-site policy, that should prompt a totally different conversation.
Overall, that note (plus the fact that it was sent in a company-wide memo - recall how huge Google is) seems like it creates gray areas for incompetent managers. Or, for a way to make any manager’s job easier during layoffs.
I wonder how long it takes to go from “those who live near Google offices” to “all employees”. Once 80-90% of employees are back at work regularly it’s not a stretch to believe that those few people who are always remote will be seen as less effective and less connected to their peers going into the office everyday. This is likely one step of many.
> For those who are remote and who live near a Google office, we hope you’ll consider switching to a hybrid work schedule. Our offices are where you’ll be most connected to Google’s community
Definitely sounds like a veiled threat to one's career if they don't choose to be connected to the community
Fully expect most people in the discussion to be pro-remote-work. But does anyone have hard evidence that working from home is as productive as working in the office?
Humorous that you're getting downvoted for asking a valid question. It's simple to me - you can emulate remote work in an office by locking yourself in a conf room and never talking to anyone IRL. You can't emulate an office while remote. Working from the office offers more optionality for communication, so there's no downside and only upside vs. remote.
If you simply want to minimize time working, which is an unknown but certainly non-zero amount of employees, it's definitely easier and more fun to do that at home vs. in an office.
There won't be hard evidence for a long time, if ever, on which is better - but the optionality argument makes the decision pretty obvious to me.
You can emulate commute fatigue by standing next to your nearest busy street to absorb the noise pollution for 45 minutes before and after the working day. You can't emulate the lack of commute fatigue while working at the office. So there's no downside and only upside vs. from office.
The optionality argument makes the decision pretty obvious to me.
It depends (Thanks senior developer!). On the type of work, on the organization. On one extreme you have me: I do 7.5h of focused "alone work" a day. And if I went to my office, none of the people I work with would be there, as they'd be in offices in other countries. We aren't a fast paced startup and our office has individual closed-door offices for each employee. So basically IF I went to the office I'd be sitting in a room by myself doing 7.5h of programming and 30 minutes of video calls to other countries. It's not going to be more productive there. Scientific studies, as always, will be hard to find.
On the other extreme you have other people with other tasks and in other kinds of organizations.
In reality though the biggest productivity boost for me is the lack of commute. Because let's face it, I'm not going to commute an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening AND be eight hours ass-in-seat. 10-11 hours away from home. It didn't happen when I did work in an office and it certainly won't happen now. The solution most did I guess was being creative and doing emails or calls while commuting. I had to pick up kids at school or kindergarten at say 3-4PM regardless of whether or not that school was an hour away or two minutes. That meant I often left the office at 2-3pm if commuting. Now I can do kid pickups, do 8h of ass-in-seat all in 8h per day (which is basically the total time of one day that I'm willing to allocate to my employer).
Me personally, I couldn't give the slightest hint of a shit about of it truly is more productive or not, I just know that I personally will never in my life step foot in an office ever again
Google seems to have always said this externally, but every time I met with Google pre-COVID, all their engineers dialed in from home. Managers in the office. I would even travel to their office. Engineers? Nope. At home.
Okay but I can think of 5 teams, all of whom showed this behavior? Even if it is "team by team" that is not the same as what Google seems to generalize about itself.
Soon many companies will not renew their lease, and there won’t be much office to return to. Those that invested a lot in their office space will try to make the best use of it, but in the long run it’s more profitable to downsize offices.
Selfishly, I love remote work. But I also think I’m not quite as productive or engaged when I’m fully remote. Still pretty productive, but not quite. (Compared to a sane in-person company without copious interruptions)
That’s a fine tradeoff for me. I’d much rather get the same salary, work from home, and just be marginally less productive.
I must be a useless worker because I really can't relate to everyone praising the productivity when WFH. My productivity is almost non-existent unless I have a super interesting task.
Seriously, I can't be the only one who is just slacking off when working from home.
It sounds like there is a mix and the most vocal ones are those whose preferred method of working is being threatened. :)
I slack off in office for a similar duration that I do at home. They might be different but the "productivity" is identical if not favoured at home because I'm more comfortable. I'll spend time configuring my nvim or reading some interesting but unrelated technical article/book or getting snacks or HN or reddit in the office. At home I might just take a nap or shower or go to the gym (or do one of the aforementioned things).
People operate differently but for me I'm only going to produce as much value as I believe I'm getting paid for. Not more and not less. I see the request to go back to office as managers believing they can act as a coercive force which might work on some (perhaps many) people.
I live about 1:30 hour from my office. Before covid I went in 2x per week. Since covid I've been to the office about 6 times in 3 years. Never going back to a regular commute. Never. Open floor plan is terrible for thought-work (programming). Having my own home office and regaining several hours per week is priceless. I would gladly take a 50% pay cut if they required me to return to commute.
Reading a lot of the comments, I think I must be an outlier.
I've got a nice study at home, with a really good PC setup, rock solid gigabit internet, very nice office chair, all the coffee in the world.
But I still really like going into the office as much as possible. I love the cycle in, the coffees with colleagues, being able to just "chat" without scheduling a call, getting lunch out with people.
I need to get better at doing that. The cycle to the office (55 mins / 23kms each way) is really good on the days I go in, but I just can't motivate myself to do the same on the days when I'm not going in!
Is there some kind of standards-document available for what makes an office comfortable? I love the collaboration of office work but I also am extremely uncomfortable with bright light, a lack of good food, and a computer setup dictated by others. It’s not enough of a distraction to want to walk away from the job — the work is great and the engineers are smart — but there’s this general lack of care and attention to detail in my workplace that makes it far inferior to my own home.
A set of core values to share with my office manager would be great. Another idea would be to find some kind of training for them in how to turn an impersonal office space into a cared-for home-from-home.
Something like Patty McCord’s / Netflix’s employee handbook, but for lighting, desks, colors, and espresso machines. It sounds so ridiculously trivial and entitled, but in business we are always trying to stay ahead of our competitors yet when it comes to the workplace the competition is gorgoiler’s home, which is stiff competition indeed.
That couldn't really exist as people are different and want different things. Using just the "espress machines" category, my partner hates light roasted third wave coffee and I like it. The only way to win is to have both a small roasters beans and Starbucks or equivalent beans.
I don't think so? I feel like that's the sort of thing that'd make the front page here, and I haven't seen something like it in a decade. It's a good idea tho!
It seems just another masked round of layoffs. If the remote worker is important, an exception will be made and nothing will change; if the remote worker is redundant, it's very regrettable that they are unable to adjust to the shifting realities of the workplace.
I'm in a tough spot with this new RTO guidelines (similar ones issues by my company). I live ~2-2.5 hours from my assigned office due to two-body problem. I travel to the office once/twice a week, but thats the max I can do - 3 days per week is impossible. I'm more productive WFH, however I utilize my office time to meet as many people in-person I can. However recently that has reduced to mostly VC time in-office as most of my team are from a different coast altogether. To me, going forward Remote works best, but these blanket rules really doesn't work for all edge cases like mine.
If your entire team is in the office, that can be much more productive than remote work. But how many companies will be able to get even 50% of a team in the same office at once, even if they force everyone to RTO? Companies already moved away from that when they started setting up offices around the world and allowed people to effectively work from anywhere. If 25% of your team is in an office in Belgium, 25% in San Francisco, 25% in Mumbai, 25% remote... is it the 25% remote that is really holding back workplace synergy?
I have a 15 minute walk to my kids' school - not a bad one either, a 30 second walk to the bus stop, a 3 minute walk to the grocery store, a 7 minute walk to the fancy grocery store near the hardware store. My religious group is a 2.5 mile drive/bike. We are approximately one hour from grandparents.
I have an old house with a small backyard and gardens, a neighborhood stuffed with kids and a community that values kids. In addition, I can save money.
Absolutely none of that is possible for my (quite decent) income in Seattle (closest tech hub).
To move me to a par Seattle house with par livability, par neighborhood, and par mortgage cost (but further away from grandparents), would be on the order of a +1M outlay - maybe +750K (but I haven't checked recently). (Wedgewood, Ravenna, or Magnolia neighborhoods, if you're curious).
In short: moving to a tech hub would be a radical downgrade to the quality of life.
As another posted:
> ... There is one side that is unambiguously pro-family, pro-environment, pro-church involvement, pro-bowling league, pro-parents in kids lives, pro-marriage, pro-divorced child raising. ...
concur.
I would also note, pointedly, that if you're a bigshot in a major tech company in a metro hub, you should be having very serious discussions with the city government about workforce housing for the > 30 set. It is actually possible to have a good metro life - if the city is designed for it.
A workplace is not a community. Google alumni don't get together at barbecues and reminisce about the good of days. They're not raising houses together for Habitat on the weekends. It's unethical dark manipulation all the way down the line.
ex-Googlers should class-action sue for emotional damages experienced by losing their only community when they are laid off
Let's see how valuable community is, then, for Google when it becomes a liability.
I honestly don't know if I could work another job where I can't work remotely. If circumstances were dire and I just had no choice, I guess I'd bite the bullet, but I would demand a -lot- more money. Even if you live close, it can take up to an hour to get to my office downtown, that's 2 hours a day that I'm sitting in traffic and not getting paid for...it actually costs me time and money. Time that is impossible to get back.
I've made countless friends over the years from office work, met one of my best friends working in an office and made a lot of contacts that have helped my career; but I'm not in my 20s anymore, barely clinging to my 30s, the office environment is mostly useless to me now.
The main drivers I see behind this is to save commercial real estate investments. Productivity can't be dropping much, if at all, if companies are still making record profits while cutting back on their workforce. I can understand wanting to meet up for a big collaboration, but after that you can go back to remote and then meet up again, that doesn't require a 5-day work week in the office.
Are they going to provide a pay raise for the lost time commuting or do they just expect their employees to take a quality of life hit without recompense?
I'm at least 2x as productive remotely than in the office. Even if commuting didn't waste my time for no reason and I'd like to hang out with people at the office I don't think it would be a good idea.
Wat? 2x? You can lock yourself in a conf room in the office and...it'll be effectively the same as if you were remote, right? I don't see the reasoning
All the people in here that can lock themselves into conference rooms for 8h, makes me wonder why companies even have open plan offices to begin with. I know that if I squat a conference room at all times, I'd get an ear full. Also conference rooms are for conferences, not for long term focused work at an ergonomic desk. Other things that make me more productive at home: I'm in an environment I like, surrounded by my wife and pet, at a desk that is just dialed in to how I like it, with very few distractions, zero commute means more sleep, kitchen at home means better food, proximity to my house means I can do some chores while on break etc.
Are you as comfortable in an office as at home? When I'm in office I can't wait to get home. When I'm WFH I don't think about time I think about tasks.
It seems like the most likely explanation for this is that it's a "soft layoff"; rather than endure the PR and morale hit of a real layoff, let them quit. Plus, even if remote work is not a within-worker disadvantage versus office work, management may nonetheless estimate that people willing to come in to the office are more attached to their jobs.
Or as it is said: the purpose of a system is what it does. If the primary effects are likely distributional via who remains a Google employee, then we can infer the goal of the decision.
There are a ton of dueling anecdotes in these comments. Is there any actual data on remote work productivity?
To me the dominant fact is that COVID happened and work seemed to continue just fine. This strongly implies to me that remote work is not a major productivity drain. But I realize there are various counterarguments (e.g. it could not have been sustained, because junior employees can't onboard successfully remotely). I don't buy them personally but I only have anecdotes, which is all anyone seems to have.
Yes. So why is there so much confidence (in both directions) in this thread about the productivity impact of remote work? It seems people are just projecting their own biases or experiences as universalizable facts.
It's a mix of bikeshedding (many people experienced remote work during the COVID lockdowns) and there being no data available for this.
Also consider who would be more likely to respond in this thread: people heavily invested in or against remote work (since there is no actual data). Always-relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/386/
I did a silly little exercise the other day, pitting my company's official Corporate Values against the non-negotiable RTO policy they forced into effect a couple months ago:
Megacorp's recent mandatory return-to-office (RTO) policy, when evaluated against its stated corporate values, raises several potential points of conflict.
Integrity: The company's value of integrity may be questioned if the policy is perceived as being imposed without transparency or clear rationale. If the decision-making process was opaque and unaccountable, it could undermine trust and the sense of fairness.
Innovation: A mandatory RTO policy could be seen as inconsistent with the value of innovation. Innovation often involves embracing change, adapting to new circumstances, and leveraging new tools and methods – remote work included. Thus, reverting to traditional office work may be seen as regressive.
Customer-first mindset: If the RTO policy adversely affects employee morale, productivity or retention, there might be indirect negative impacts on customer service and satisfaction.
Entrepreneurial thought and action: Entrepreneurship often entails autonomy, flexibility, and the ability to work independently. A top-down policy mandating return to the office might be seen as limiting these aspects, potentially contradicting this corporate value.
Diversity, Equality, and Inclusion: A mandatory RTO policy could disproportionately impact employees who have caregiving responsibilities, health concerns, or other personal circumstances that make remote work more feasible and attractive. This could lead to concerns about inclusivity and equity.
Collaboration: While collaboration can indeed be enhanced by in-person interaction, modern digital tools also enable effective remote collaboration. Thus, enforcing a return to the office might be seen as a narrow interpretation of this value.
Competitive Spirit: If other companies are offering flexible or remote work arrangements, a mandatory RTO policy might affect Megacorp's ability to attract and retain top talent, impacting its competitiveness.
Execution: Depending on the details of the RTO policy, it could potentially disrupt work schedules and productivity, thus affecting the company's capacity for effective execution.
one thing that i feel will come to a head is that there are many reasonable accommodations for wfh (family issues, health, flexibility, a11y) which i support, but that there is a growing resentment and classism associated with wfh.
i love that people can wfh 100% and spend time in their _favourite_ place and raise their kids and see their family and do whatever they want, but it's quite possibly the most privileged position to be in globally. i wish that people put as much emphasis on their communities and raising wages and transforming their cities as they do about their absolute hatred of offices.
i _support_ wfh, but some of the takes are pretty insufferable. "i want to be there for my kids" yeah so does EVERYONE. most workers cannot do that, must live very far away especially in the bay area, and don't have the resources to have a large enough space to do their job remotely, if they can do so at all. i feel so much sadness and pity for the state of affairs witnessing how privileged tech workers act. feels a lot like urban flight all over again, but this time instead of race, it's just wealth.
i don't know how to support both wfh and a reasonable equitable society like that in europe, at least not with 40k FAANG workers demanding that they live their life how they want, when they want, where they want.
> i love that people can wfh 100% and spend time in their _favourite_ place and raise their kids and see their family and do whatever they want, but it's quite possibly the most privileged position to be in globally. i wish that people put as much emphasis on their communities and raising wages and transforming their cities as they do about their absolute hatred of offices.
Very much agree, WFH is super privileged. Though I'd argue it's actually much easier for me with kids to help transform my city while WFH. Because I have more time to have workers at home, I can lunch out during the day, I can take a couple hours to participate in the local communities during the day (sports club for example) or simply use the local services while still managing a full day of work.
With the commute and the office, the only thing I'm able to do is go home as fast as possible to get my kids back from school and go home to be with them.
(oh and that's without counting actually helping the folks who have to be in the workplace, by reducing traffic and decongestioning after work opening hours)
3 days on site requires you to live close and will explode even more housing costs, driving lower wage people to leave. I just don’t get why companies and government don’t work out something that would benefit the country as a whole in the longer term.
2 days on site would eventually allow for a one night stay in a hotel in the area and focussed 2 days team work.
I can say that I will only start looking in my area in the future and evtl earn less, start to consume less as relocating is no option.
... except if the air is bad due to Canadian forest fires (which truly sux right now). NYC today looks like Ottawa a day or two ago. People are cranking up their HEPA filters and digging up masks from 2020/Covid.
On the serious side, companies that will trust their staff and let them work as they wish when it's ok for productivity will be the ones that have the best chance to pull in talent and the largest pool to fish in.
At my company, I recently joined a team that meets in the office once per week. I haven’t been to an office in years. It looks incredibly expensive, two floors in a very nice office building with every bell and whistle you can imagine. I saw maybe 30 people there total (including my once-a-week team). The rent plus the cost of operating the place… I can’t even guess how much money is being wasted. Shareholders would be pissed.
I work remotely for more than 5 years. After my daughter was born, the productivity is a rollercoaster and I needed to modify my working schedule by a lot according her daytime activities. I think, I could provide a more precise output sitting in an office, on the other hand I need to be a very effective and finish the task before she starts to play around me :)
I still don't understand that a company who makes a ton of money from creating tools that fascilitate better remote working is against its own employees doing it.
Remote work is here to stay. Sure, colocated work is too, but trying to put the genie back in the bottle _at a tech company_ is surely a losing battle. Or is the total comp at Google really that good?
what is missing from remote work is the casual learning when folks are standing in front of you. i miss those exchanges during remote work.
what i do NOT like about working in office is the bloody commute.
as a contractor, the simple fix is to charge much more when traveling.
we charge by the week, not the day nor the hour, for example, discounts
given for monthly stays.
Maybe it's just my work experience, but I've learned nothing more since coming to the office. The majority of conversations that happen near me are between people in their native language which I do not understand. So maybe it could be happening, but if it is, it's not happening for me
Meanwhile I (amazon) am returning to my local office by myself as the rest of my team is in Seattle or California
The next year or three will be weird for office work, but at the end I’m fairly convinced it will look like pre-pandemic (5 days butt in seat, teams colocated, remote is 2nd class citizen)
I'd say age is certainly a factor in this issue. Generation Gap for the 21st century.
My Gen X generation would be used to office work but comfortable with modern technology. Although many times for complex subjects when you get into back and force messages "just call me" would enter my brain.
Millennial would be similar but grew up with more tech. Voice calls on phones would have been replaced by texts when they were young. Last golden age of TV was over so not much of a draw. I'd guess messaging would be more comfort that for all except the oldest audio voice calls. They be more comfortable working remotely but have certainly experience office life.
I'd Gen Z was born into tech never knowing TV and wouldn't care. Face to face in an office wold be alien for some maybe they never even had a job yet. Email would be ancient tech, messaging is basically speech and cryptic at that.
Basically I think there is a clash of culture and it depends on your generation how comfortable you are which results in how efficient of a worker you are.
It's a training ground for the job not really for office politics and office life. There should be a required university course "How to survive in an office 101"
In an office. Maybe it's just me but an office environment would be different than a university environment. It's similar yes but not the same. There are more consequences for your actions in an office plus you are getting paid. Offices would have a wide range of ages compared to a University.
Everyone is talking about commute time and noise issues when it comes to going to the office.
No one has mentioned the smell. Some office reek of fear. In other you can smell stress. When it rains and it's hot, there a diffuse sense of sweat from all the people swetting inside the office.
Yet in other ones, usually the poorly built ones, there's a strong sense of plastic.
The smell of the building is usually a constant background smell. Brick and mortar buildings smell much better than a glassy skyscraper with constant climatization.
Is no one bothered by that?
Usually home, or the local park, smell much better. I prefer to work in public parks rather than office.for exactly that reason.
In the long run, I look forward to people and companies sorting themselves to their respective camps of "remote" vs "non-remote". Economics will prove which one works better.
What I don't get in all this is the at the beginning of the pandemic, HR, management etc made it very very clear that this was all a temporary situation and remote work would be allowed (enforced) for the short duration of the pandemic and then everybody would be expected to return to the office. I'm sure everyone was given a letter to that effect by HR. What is now going on with this "surprised Pikachu face" where everybody thinks that they can just stay remote for all time? It's ridiculous.
If you decided to sell your house or give up your rental in a good (perhaps expensive) location in the city near your place of work for a "better life" outside the city in new accommodation, well under the knowledge that after the pandemic offices might very well return to work and are now complaining about things like commute and quality of life is frankly laughable. You took a hell of a risk doing that and it's now not paying off.
The thing about being in an office is it's not about you, it's not about what you want and how your life is better being away from the office. It's about what you bring to everybody else, what you bring to a team of people more junior than yourself and what you can do to help other people. It's extremely hard to find new talent in a junior team working remotely - in fact I'd say it's almost impossible.
Pulling up the ladder behind you now that you've got yours and a comfortable life outside the office is frankly selfish. I can see that managers often get the blame here with comments like "they just need people to manage in the same building" I think that's very unfair because actually what they are trying to do is to manage a team of all skill levels and seniorities and by having a remote, or even semi remote, workforce that job is made much more difficult. Covid started about 3 years ago so anyone with less than 3 years of professional experience has probably never ever seen a real working office, just remember that.
It's worker fighting for more right. I don't see the problem there. I does not mean that it is "right", or good for the company, for the team or "morally good".
In an ideal world we should all work for "the greater good", but this is just a job. Trying to get more out of your labor is fine. Company always try to squeeze as much as possible out of their worker, why should it be wrong to do the same ? It is a business relationship.
Does anyone besides FAAM-sized entities care what Google thinks or does?
There is a very real reason disruption matters. Can Google be disrupted? Absolutely. However, will they? I believe so. But not by playing by the same rules.
It's actually to their benefit to allow fully remote because if you force me to live in the bay area you need to pay me 30%+ more to pay the bank for my mortgage or my landlord.
I don’t get the vehemence on these threads. If you don’t like it, work for someone else. There is and always has been massive diversity in tech work arrangements. I’ve met engineers who have been remote-only since the 80s. Most large companies will relax their policies if you’re a good producer or have a trusting manager, long before Covid. And when I look at job openings, the vast majority still list “remote” for engineers and technical roles.
It’s painful to see the most entitled industry in the world angry that they have to switch companies sometimes…
This is a good thing. It will force some to venture out on their own where they will learn to stand on their own two feet. Or it will hold employees accountable to the shareholders (owners of the company) to provide a collaborative, in-person, company culture which ultimately enhances productivity and efficiency.
In short, Grow Up!
(a message from a tech worker who has rarely worked from home and has reaped the benefits of in office work throughout the pandemic)
First off, employees aren't directly accountable to shareholders. Nor should they be. Company boards are.
Secondly, how about providing a collaborative, remote company culture which enhances productivity and efficency? Which also widens the global hiring pool and doesn't discriminate against those who can't travel for hours a day. For tech companies, forcing their workers in to metal tubes and high-rises for hours a day will never be as purvasive as it is now, and I hope it stays that way.
(A message from a tech worker who performs great at his remote job for the last 8 years and has reaped the benefits of remote work before, during and after the pandemic)
"First off, employees aren't directly accountable to shareholders. Nor should they be. Company boards are."
In the real world this statement is demonstrably false. Ask the majority of employees in the world, because if they aren't the owner they are working directly for the primary shareholder of the business.
>Or it will hold employees accountable to the shareholders (owners of the company)
I own stock in my company, I don't want to go back to office. if you really care about coddling shareholders I suppose you're also in favor wage suppression, anti-union activity, corporate job cuts, and all the other anti-worker crap management & owners throw down. in short, grow up & realize a mindset like yours just holds the people who actually get stuff done back
So you own part of the company but don't want to be as productive as possible. You would rather handicap your business by stifling communication. You are the shareholder buddy. Can you tell me the company name so I can divest in it?
if companies want people back in the office they should be required to start compensating for commutes. travel time, gas / electric for vehicles, etc. I sincerely do not give a damn about "productivity" or any other corporate BS from management when they can't even put their money where their mouth is
I don't think there are any serious groups which are not acting like the pandemic is over by all practical standards.
Variants descended from the Spanish flu still infect and kill people but that pandemic is not ongoing. The point at which it made sense to accept even very mild disruptions to daily life due to COVID has passed and nearly everyone understands that.
The pandemic is over, but the economical damage is permanent. Cost of living is rising and never going back. Small and medium businesses are closing while enterprises are cutting head counts.
When WWII ended, the changes it made to the world never reverted to the prior status. Also, the rest of history since then has been completely dominated by the effects of WWII and its continuity including the very next wars such as conflicts in Israel, Korea, cold-war, and more. There was no point where the issues really ended, but we do reasonably say that WWII ended. What came next and later was something distinct enough that we consider it something else.
What we have in covid reality today is a continued world with covid existing and a ton of irreversible changes that covid time made to the world. But that's not denied when people say the pandemic is over.
Commenters of my comment clearly have no clue about how the covid provokes long term inflammation in the brain (yeah even for those vaccinated, and even without symptoms, you just can't know if couple weeks after complete remission you'll be unable to read a book ever anymore).
Anyway I just hope those are not the replies from Google's managers. If it is, then I'm done considering Alphabet as my dream place to work at in the near future.
I was believing that they were the crowd most likely to be very learnt into the scientific details of how covid acts on the brain, how symptoms appear or not, how (little) vaccine influence transmission, and what long covid is according to the last research.
Last but not least, I thought they would be among the first to realize that the covid infection numbers are down for the only reason that testing and tracing have almost stopped altogether.
The epidemic is not over. In a few years, we may look at Biden's announcing that COVID was over like we now look at Bush's "Mission Accomplished" banner. Denial is a big problem here.
Here's a recent overview article in Nature on long COVID:
"At least 65 million individuals around the world have long COVID, based on a conservative estimated incidence of 10% of infected people and more than 651 million documented COVID-19 cases worldwide1; the number is likely much higher due to many undocumented cases. The incidence is estimated at 10–30% of non-hospitalized cases, 50–70% of hospitalized cases, and 10–12% of vaccinated cases."
"Hundreds of biomedical findings have been documented, with many patients experiencing dozens of symptoms across multiple organ systems. Long COVID encompasses multiple adverse outcomes, with common new-onset conditions including cardiovascular, thrombotic and cerebrovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS) and dysautonomia, especially postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome (POTS). Symptoms can last for years, and particularly in cases of new-onset ME/CFS and dysautonomia are expected to be lifelong. With significant proportions of individuals with long COVID unable to return to work, the scale of newly disabled individuals is contributing to labour shortages. There are currently no validated effective treatments."
There's now a working definition of the symptoms that distinguish long COVID.[2] Imaging studies are matching up heart, lung, and brain damage with reported symptoms. It's becoming clearer what the damage is, and, over time, what heals and what doesn't.
People can get COVID over and over, sometimes with cumulative damage. Immunity from both vaccines and infections is only 3-18 months. What is this going to look like in five years?
And companies want to cram people into bullpens again.
> It blows my mind that Google management is among those who think that the pandemic is over.
The pandemic is over for people who are fully vaccinated (and have likely already had Covid on top of that).
Vaccines do make us less likely to spread Covid to others, but the crucial part is that they protect us. It's good for the public if everyone is vaccinated, but it's not a vital component of keeping ourselves safe. It's not like masking, where we needed others to use masks.
As for the immunocompromised, all companies should make a policy to allow those people to work remotely forever.
Wow, this is really great information. It makes a lot of sense. Masks make it more likely to breathe in aerosols and vaccines make it more likely to get infected. You should share these findings with the scientific community. We need more studies like yours.
This whole thing reminds me of that letter that gets passed around from time to time online written by one Jourdon Anderson to his former white male American slaver Colonel P. H. Anderson.
I had to look it up to find the postscript which I think is very precient today:
"P.S.— Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me."
The compromise is simple but nobody wants to say it, only single people who live alone should be allowed to work from home.
People with kids or spouses, or those with roommates, should not be allowed to work from home because many in that situation (I’ve learned) do very little work and others have to take up the slack.
"Hey, so I see you're living with other human beings. I'm afraid remote work isn't open to you."
"Oh, ok that seems fair. As a result of the fact that I can't afford a home all to myself, I will absolutely commute for 2 hours a day to come to an office filled with other parents and caregivers."
It's clear to me that no work situation is ideal for everyone or every group.
My "selfish" point of view is that I hope that remote work takes over more and more, and that companies stop forcing workers back into the office full-time.
My personal life situation makes remote work almost a requirement if I want to continue being a software developer. I'm divorced with a young son over whom I have 50% custody. I won't move to a "tech hub" city for a job and abdicate my responsibilities as a father. Even my current job is only a 40 minute commute for me by car, and I still only go to the office once or twice per week: the days that I have to drop off or pick my son up from school won't really accommodate a 40 minute commute unless I'm only going to work a 5-6 hour day.
I count myself as very fortunate that my current work situation is with wonderful people, who all have families as well, and mostly-remote was part of my initial negotiation.
On the flip side of feeling fortunate, I have to remind myself that the company is fortunate, too. Not that I'm not humble, but I do think I'm a pretty good software dev and a generally good employee who takes pride in their work.
I guess the point of spilling out my personal life story on the internet is that I hope that companies realize that forcing on-location work is not just a choice between an employee being at home or being in the office; it may be a choice between having a good employee and not having them at all.